Network Meeting in Maastricht

Article posted: 9.03.07

Iris Rekola

9-11 March 2007, Network Meeting in Maastricht

General things

The network meeting was held in a neighbourhood about 30 minute walk from the city centre, in a scouts’ house. The first night was quite interesting, I slept with all the clothes I could find, wearing a hat and gloves in a sleeping bag. Quite cold. All in all, the organisation was done quite well, I think. There was enough food, and mostly we stayed in the schedule. There were about 30 participants, mainly from the Netherlands and Belgium.

Maastricht is a very nice city with beautiful architecture and historical buildings. One of the organisers took us on a short city tour on Friday night in the rain, and the history is really quite interesting. Here’s one picture from the centre. Honestly, I didn’t manipulate the colours and the camera isn’t broken. It was just the amazing weather with rain and evening sun.

Programme

The programme wasn’t so full as I was used to after the regional meetings. Some participants even complained to be bored, so that was a small problem. On Friday evening we didn’t have any “official” program besides introductions and the short city tour. A really nice thing was the good news from netcommie Robin. She told about new antennas starting up in the UK and France. The new local, AEGEE-Luxembourg, was present in the meeting as well.

Saturday

We started by watching movie The Inconvenient Truth (a document about global warming). It was followed by a discussion. Environment became a big issue during this weekend, and in the end a group was thinking, how it could used as a theme for AEGEE in 2008. Most likely a new working group will be formed on this topic, as there are already people interested and ready to take the initiative.

All the workshops were done with the whole group (about 30 people). Unfortunately that meant that it was mainly the same people speaking all the time, and most of the people participated just by listening.

In the afternoon there was AEGEE café, little tables about projects, working groups, CD-house and more. We also did a workshop about stereotypes. By 18:30 program was finished. After the dinner we went to town to celebrate Chuck Norris’s and Osama Bin Laden’s birthday. Dutch humour…

Sunday

In the morning we had a workshop about social exclusion. That was however a very short one. We had another workshop about the Summer University project. In that workshop Laura from Comité Directeur answered participants’ questions, so the content was quite varied. As a conclusion, we talked about possible themes for AEGEE in 2008 and did the general evaluations of the weekend.