SAILORS ARE DISCOVERING THE NATION

Journey through citezenship is continuing. Sailors after first two days are getting more and more tired, but still motivated to continue sailing, that’s why in the morning they were on the board again. Our Captains (as allways J ) are thinking about the sailors team spirit, that’s why they needed to use all coorporation skills to make the circle from certain amount of chairs and stick the flipcharts to the walls. From our observations – task spliting, helping to each other and fun helped to finish task very quickly. But that was the easiest task of the day. Sailors started their journey into Nation. Actually what is nation? After exchange of sailor’s ideas during „Brain Storming”, they still didn’t get the definition, just a general overwiev. „Brain storming” was continuing and sailors also needed to answer the question – WHAT IS STATE? Only afterwards they got clear (more or less) what is what. Sailing is continuing..

Silent disscussion.

You might ask – what is it? We know it now. J You can also disccuss something without talking. How? By writing J Sailors had this great possibilty to put out their opinion on the paper by answering to three questions – DOES THE NATION MAKES STATE OR STATE MAKES NATION?, IS NATIONALITY IMPORTANT FOR YOU?, DO WE NEED NATIONAL STATES? Very hard task. Because questions are not so easy to answer and makes to things about maybe which you don`t think during your daily life. Also because of silence. You just allowed to write and respond why writing. As we know, that some people are emotional, it realy needs a lot nerves to stick to the rules of task.
First part of the day was ending with quite simple task, but it turned out to be very emotional one and brought in „shock” element for some sailors. Task was to answer to some questions conected with nation and state by finding your way in YES and NO line. Unfortunatelly due to time limits some sailor’s left the ship confused and where heading for lunch... We hope, that this new expierences will help for them in future (how, it’s up to them)....

FROM SAILORS INFO SHEET:

NATION – group of people peoplesharing common identity, hiostory, origins, language, religion, customs, territory, behaviours and culture.
STATE – legimitized administrative and decision making institution.

The naturalization test controversy

Well, that was tense. What’s naturalization? How does a country build a test for giving citizenship? These were the questions that characterized the afternoon.
The controversy appeared when our dear sailors had to think and compose “the perfect test”. Because not everybody agreed with the topic, or they didn’t understand what was that about. Eventually they reached to a compromise, and started working on the topic.
Surprising was the task afterword. Answering ourselves to the question the other sailors thought of, and eventually get another nationality. Well, most of the sailors managed to get, by unknown methods the citizenship. But still, some of us couldn’t. by now I couldn’t figure out why.Anyway, it was a pleasant experience

To vote, or not to vote?

For someone among us, was the first official vote. “it was quite good. I took it more like a role play, but I liked the pictures part”, declared Tuuli, our beginner in the voting thing.
The debate upon compulsory, or non-compulsory voting has culminated with a democratic vote. To vote whether we agree or do not agree with compulsory voting. Unfortunately Andrew was missing,(hope he is ok). Anyway, the results were: the compulsory voting strategy received 6 votes, the 8 votes for non-compulsory voting, 3 blank votes, and 2 votes wasted.
LATEST NEWS: Andrew is ok, just a bit cold. He would have voted for the non-compulsory voting, so we don’t have to worry about the final result. The other news, the most important one, is that we are THE FIRST SAILOR CREW voting for NON-COMPULSORY voting method.

The question of the day: If you weren’t born as a member of your nation, which nationality would you chose and why?

Ali: I love Australia. It is like separate from the rest of the world. I wouldn’t need to focus on the world’s problems and could go to another countries for the winter vacations.

Lucie: New Zealand. Because it is a quite modern country and it has a lot of green nature.

Jendrek: Tanzania. Because it is a nation really different from Europe and it is free of all the historical issues and people are basically happy there and they have totally different perspective on some basic issues in life.

Gijs: I love France because of the mentality. I like their identity. It is hard to explain, it is more a matter of feelings. And French is of course the most beautiful language in the world.

Merlin: Because it left a high and warm impression in me. I stayed there for a while and I will return there in a minute, if I could.

Saskia: As I have never felt such as home as I feel now in Italy (can’t explain it – it is just a feeling) – maybe Italy. But I was also concerning Sweden as an option.

Local community

After the intercultural evening everybody was apparently capable to be in time for breakfast. Immediately we knew it was going to be a long day. But as real sailors should be, we love long trips on challenging waves. We were going to explore the “local community” and had 6 hours to reach the finish with 3 ships and 3 seas to cross: see Discovery, see Dreaming and see Design. The first obstacle blew us to Poland, to a small community far away from “civilization”. The youth over there grabs every chance to escape to the “modern” world. Our main goal was to introduce citizenship again and make the local community worth living in.
The first wave was to “discover” what happened and how it could come this far. The school was too far, there were almost no busses, etc. But there was also strength in the community we had to take in mind to take in our plan to let revive the village like the little tourism and the agricultural possibilities that were laying there. The second wave looked simple but was more challenging then we could imagine: Dreaming… dreaming about how it all should be, the perfect community! We would build out the community’s strengths and even integrate these aspects, as well as creating a more social feeling between the citizens, young and older, due to installing facilities like art, youth clubs,… Our last wave we had to get over without going overboard was to put it all in practice by “designing” and visualize it so everybody could behold how it will all look like in the future. So we started collecting materials like color papers, scissors, glue to make some kind of maquette and drew our plans so the whole world could see what we came up to, to get the best out of a community and let it revive.
The three ships crossed the finish line after a rough and exhausting day, nobody fell overboard and they all had great stories to tell to the world from the moment they get their first step on vast soil.

Happy Crewbuilding

At the beginning of a training course, there was one main problem: how to make the participants `familiar` in a short time? That was the first goal of our nice sailors / trainers !

The participants had a typical sailor teambuilding exercise! Some dynamic ball games were coming at first, to assure a perfect memorisation of each participants from 27 countries in Europe! Then they had an artistic session: participants expressed the painter within themselves by making a portrait of eachother in the strict rules of modern art!

As you can see from the present photo showing their home-made map of Europe, the talent of each of them doesn’t need more proof! After these `ice-breaking` exercises, trainers asked us to dive into the deep chaos of our minds to put on tour ideas of the trip of their dreams… And finally, at the end of this `warm up` day, all the group was ready for their initial goal: playing their own sketches of different decisive periods of citizenship building !

Because, yes, we are coming to the main point: artists or non-talented people, dreamers or nothing of that, we are all citizens of Europe!

New Sailor on the Crew

Yesterday, Monday 17th November 2008 a new intrepid sailor joined the crew. She was seen hanging around at various times during the day, and also joined in a number of activities.

We don’t know our new friend’s name, but she’s sweet and furry, she’s got four legs and longs for love and attention. By now you must have probably realised that we are speaking about the dog which was around us yesterday.

They say that dogs have a sixth sense. She seemed to realise that we are a great group of people to hang around with. She realised that WE ARE THE FUTURE, and wanted to be there with us. It was as if she wanted to motivate us an tell us that we are going in the right direction.

So, guys and girls, remember that the dog is always right. We are the FUTURE and the future is BRIGHT!

Big Boy failed!

Finally, they didn’t succeed. Big Boy, the Austrian – Greek – Turkish – Italian boat, lost the Montijo Boat Race that took place yesterday in Montijo fountain arena, in front of thousands people. “It was projected to win, we worked hard on it, we’re quite disappointed” told us Kostas Pozios, the Greek engineer of Big Boy, after the competition.
Anyway, there were many complains after the race: Big Boy team claims that other boats used not permitted engines. “What a shame, they cheated!” according to Halim Nalbant, the informatics engineer of Big Boy. Anyway Thomas Dusch, the Austrian skipper of Big Boy, is optimistic:” It was a very hard competition, our engineers did their best, we will make improvements for the sailing boat trip to Lisbon to be the first!” In fact, though they lost Montijo race, Big Boy team is aware that their boat is fast and performing: sure they’re going to win many competition this year

Harbour Invasion!!!

Sailors from different countries just reach Montijo for a very special mission: get to know how to develop active citizenship in their local communities.
The invasion will last one week (until 24th November) and is ready to shake the local society with new ideas, actions and way of thinking. The reason of the invasion is to support the professional development of young trainers and to raise the quality of their projects concerning citizenship.
According to our sources, the sailors intend to make some noise and wake up the sleeping citizens making them active and aware to the rights and duties of be a part of the society, without forgetting the social, political and cultural background.
During next days our reporters will be in touch with all the crew and we will notice all the most important outcomes from that invasion.

Warning to Population!!!

Yesterday four known captains were seeing walking through Montijo. According police source 4 evil captains (Capt. Ondrej “Red Eye”, Capt. “Evil” Kasia, Capt. Marco “Wooden Foot” and Capt. Jendrek “Panda”) were seeing walking around thinking how to implement some activities in our city.
The same source noticed that they were caring apples, toasts, grapes and water to start to work in their evil plan. The police was already warned and will increase vigilance during the next days.
The last time where they was saw together was in Czech Republic and until now the local authorities are still counting all the damages that they provoke there.
According to Interpol Capt. Kasia and Ondrej were working lately in Israel and Palestine, Capt. Marco in Estonia and Capt. Jendrek in Poland If you have any more information about their location or their objectives, please warn the closest police station.

Evaluation & Celebration

We met in the middle of nowhere, some of us got a bit lost on the way but in the end we all got safe and sound to the harbour. Early morning the work started. Brainstorming, discussion and some planning took place. Objectives and aims, knowledge, skills and attitudes of the training course were analyzed and are in intensive development. That is not all...we also listened to stories of old sailors, our founding fathers about how it all began...We saw the movie of the Polish edition. In the evening we decided to connect with local community. We discovered, at least some of us, that calling a cab is not that easy, especially in the middle of the night. Others checked the comfort of the sofa in the corridor, while there were also those who spent the night in the car (always remember about your keys!). One person had a unique opportunity to get in personal contact with local authorities. The police was happy to reassure the sailors that the captain was sober - no rum in the blood :)

Evaluation meeting! Together again!

Godfather of sailors, called!

16 sailors responded (including 3 harbour-workers).

As sailors are used to hard work, there was no suprise, therefore when...

... the swords were given, and...
some heads were chopped off!
(scared face)

Network has been established, although some sheep decided to go wild and blind.

This time Johnny was rescued!

Cookie saloon was a jackpot of the venue!

Thanks to Pan, we have a new, nice, flying, awsome, joyful, beautiful, wonderful, cool and even sexy, attractive and accesible CitizenShip!

It takes three to the couple :)

The CitizenSHIP sails to Turkey