Global Village
Date: 03/11/2014
Location: JAMKO Cafe
Last week, I got to be a small part of the organizing team for the Global Village event. Now, i got the chance to be the one reflecting some memories here to our blog.
The organizing team has 4 people: Tu Linh Dong, Lena Rogova, Olga Borisova, Sarah Perrine and Linh is the team leader. All of them have just recently joined AIESEC at the beginning of this autumn. This event was the first time ever for them to work in a group as an AIESECer.
Picture 1. Our lovely organizing team
So now the event was finally over, what was your first feeling that appeared?
Sarah: relieved (laugh)
Linh: I was relieved (smile)
Lena: I was pretty satisfied. :)
Organizing an event, whether it is small or big, takes investment. With the hope was to make their first event as perfect as possible, there would be no surprise they had put quite an effort and time. Before the event date, most of them were stressful worrying about what could go wrong during the process, which was quite normal for any event organizers. To see the final product delivered to participants, they could let go the deep breath they had hold back. "We finally made it!" - that is the relief wrapping around any person after first times doing something.
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| Picture 2. The cultural experiences board. |
Global Village was created in order to promote AIESEC's projects for whom wish to be volunteers abroad. At this event, participants were introduced to four countries: Colombia, the Philippines, Uganda and Poland. First, our lovely host Sarah facilitated people to write down their most memorable cultural clashing experiences. Then those notes would be taped on the board, which were voted later to choose the best story with a winner prize (sweet chocolate bars, we figured who would not love chocolates?). The idea behind this is to show that cultural differences can happen everywhere but only by travelling will you get a full insight into a country's culture and values, which is also the main purpose of Global Citizen project.
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| Picture 3. Food display |
After that, the participants got the chance to taste four different kinds of dishes from above countries.The organizing team did a good job bringing the cultural factor here. They cooked themselves the food (the team leader Linh even made two dishes from Uganda and Philippines herself) even though they did not originally come from the countries. The feedback they got was highly positive. Videos about four countries were introduced at the same time. The purpose was to raise people's knowledge about the countries they might be interested in coming to work. There were also guest speakers: two travelers to Philippines and Poland who gave us briefly their own opinions about those two countries and Linnea - who was a volunteer to Uganda through AIESEC.
"As a leader for this project, I had drawn up a lot of ideas at the beginning. I was full of energy and expectations to make all of the ideas work. It was indeed a pity that some of them were changed at the end due to the limited time and some twisted technical problems we had. However, of course, I had a valuable experience to see how the reality of event became much different than planning on papers. I learnt most about time management but also other project skills as well. If I could choose to do it again, I would have probably made the same decision. Moreover, being mainly responsible for this event was more stressful than I thought. Not in a stressful scary way but I mean I needed to be the one committing fully at the event. It was also my first time working with other new members of AIESEC, so i cannot lie that there was no problem at all. There was some differences in working styles, which I do not think they came from different cultural background but from different personalities. However, they were not that major that we could not get through it. Eventually we did organize the event as successful as a demo version to the participants and we were all happy about it." - Linh (translated and written by blog administration).
"For all of us, it was our first time working together and it was also our first event. I used to work on projects with people in the US and now I got to work with different people from different nationalities, I realized how not alike the way we thought. It is like, planning an event would be the same all over the world but in reality, we were all different. The only thing irritating me was the unexpected problem happening at the beginning, when our venue had some other people using still and we found difficulty settling people down or moving them." - Sarah
"Anyway, it was such a good experience. I thought the event was good in my opinion. This project started only more than 2 weeks before the event actually took place but i thought we did it well. People loved the food and seemed to enjoy the time. I would surely join organizing more events after this." - Lena
Both three members of the organizing team I interviewed agreed that the event could be better but it was perfect to be as a start. The participants were asked to leave feedbacks at the end and here are some of the opinions:
- "Seems interesting. I was already thinking of going to an interview."
- "Everything was very nice but it would be better if the sound system was louder."
- "Thank you for evening, That was very interesting."
- "That was great. But i hope to have more info."
As we all can see, there were both positive and negative feedbacks. Reading them, I thought, what could be better result for the first time organizing an event? There were things they needed to colled for further development but that was the whole point for "first times". Being a part of AIESEC means being brave. They are not more experienced than the rest of us but AIESEC showed them not to worry about such thing. AIESEC becomes the place where they were given the chances to practice their "first times", because it is also the place where fear does not stand as an obstacle.
Global Village will be soon happened again in January with more improvements. This time, you got to know what the countries are like and what it is like to live abroad. Some brochures about volunteer projects were also passed around during the event. Next time, participants will be given more answers to their queries deeper to volunteer projects. Until then, you all can check out more information and even apply here http://www.aiesec.fi/ if you are interested. Curious about how life of a volunteer is? You can read the stories' posts on AIESEC JKL facebook or blog.
Let's be brave and face the challenges like how AIESEC members have done.
- Nghi Dang -
AIESEC Blog Administration
