We were full of curiosity and the wish to get to know each other and we took part of many activities that helped us achieve this. Joining us were many people who come from outside of Tamera who were curious to get to know about Tamera and the work being done here. As Tamera was hosting the Global Campus in parallel to the Youth Camp we were able to gain insights into the world situation and the work being done in certain parts of the planet. We spent time with some of the leaders of the various international projects participating in the Global Campus. For example, Claudio Miranda and Hellem from the project „Favela da Paz“ in Sao Paulo, or Phillip Munyasia from „Otepic“ in Kenya. They shared about their time as teenagers. It’s clear they come from quite a different situation from what we are used to. They shared how they came up with ideas of how to change their life situation and that of those in their local communities, also sharing about the challenges they faced along the way. After they were shared the space was full of questions and lively discussions, helping us go deeper in understanding of the world. The world and its challenges came much closer to us.
During our time together theater and other creative tools brought us into a space where we could drop our normal ways of behaving in order to jump into new and different roles that helped us reveal parts of ourselves that we didn’t know before. These experiences helped to form a group beyond our normal everyday connections.
Neel, one of our teenies would describe it like this:
„It was beautiful to see each one overcoming his borders. Jumping from 9m height into the water or letting you fall in 10 hands without seeing them. At the beginning our main issue was community. And from this topic all the questions came up: how to build trust among people? What is the difference between a group and a community? First it was meant to be a circle about one main question but it turned to be a discussion with 1000 other questions. From one question came another.
Every little thing that we did brought us another step forward for being a good group. Walking 16 km together or even in the 5 minutes breaks between meetings. We had again and again beautiful spaces where one could see that the guests could trust us more and more and tell us the things that really moved them. Everyone had the chance to show his talent in the group or even in public. Daring to sing or make acrobatic performances. It’s difficult and almost impossible to tell you about 2 weeks of adventures, processes, heart touching, funny and wonderful time in only one paragraph. But I hope that I could give you a little view into our youth camp. The time was great and nobody said that he doesn’t want to come next year again to see Tamera and how it develops.
Thank you Juliane, Kalin, Eiko, Maria and Jan for being such a wonderful team for us.“
I want to especially thank all the teenies that were with us, for the joy that they created, for the questions that they brought, for the challenges that we went through, and especially that we went through them together. I hope everybody can keep the treasures that were created in the time back at home. I am looking forward to see everyone again here in Tamera or somewhere else on this planet.
Thank you very much,
Eiko, in the name of the whole team
