Journey To The North2

One of our team members of Youth Empowering, ricky raymon, attended International Youth Forum Seliger 2010 in Tver, Russia. Here is the report of his journey.

Ricky Raymon (second person from right), one of YEP's member.

There are many things that can be told about Seliger, but of course it will spend a lot of time and paper, so in I’ll just try to make it short and put the important things here.

International Youth Forum Seliger 2010 is an international project held by Russian International Relations and Youth Exchange Department of the Federal Agency on Youth Affairs, aimed at uniting the world leaders of tomorrow to build an international network. There are around 3,000 individuals who become participants of this international forum, 1,000 come from around Russian Federation, and 2,000 from the rest of the world, such as from European Countries (UK, Netherland, Portugal, Spain, France, Armenia, Italy, Germany, Georgia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Belorussia, Serbia, Turkey, Greek, Latvia, Belgium, Norway, and Swedish), Asian countries (India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, China, Japan, South Korea, Yemen, Israel, Syria, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Langka), Caucasus countries (Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Aljerbarjan, and Ukraine), African countries (Egypt, Algeria, Kenya, and Nigeria), American and Latin countries (USA, Canada, Mexico, Jamaica, Brazil, and Uruguay), and Australia. The model of this forum is actually different comparing to other common forums, which is not held in modern buildings, room full of glasses, in hotel or seminar rooms, but instead of that, is held in the ‘mother’-nature, in the middle of the beautiful scenery of Lake Seliger, in Tver region from 1st to 8th July 2010. Yes, it’s like a camp, a summer camp—where nature becomes the class, where no boundaries for our thought. You may think that this forum is just like a ‘barbarians’ forum, where we need to live anciently, far away from modernity, far away from technology, but honestly it was not like that at all, because in Seliger itself, there were WiFi around the area, computer centre, outdoor gym, big stage and big projector for any kind of activities such as watching World Cup, LCD TV in every corner (since Seliger has its own TV Channel), plug-in center, and other outdoor facilities.

In Seliger participants were divided per camp related to the topics or issues that they had chosen in the application form. There are four topics (we just called camps) which are: Russia and Global Politics (International Politics), Environment and Sustainable Development, Civil Society, Arts and Design. Every camp has its own different schedule of lectures, which related to its topic. I took Russian and Global Politics camp, so logically most of my lectures were about politics.

Basically, the daily activity began at 8.00 am, started by the morning speech of the committee and Mr. Mikhail Mamonov (as the director of this program). There were two kinds of morning exercises that can be chosen, whether jogging for around 5 KM, or stayed at the stage’s field in order to have physical exercises led by ‘sexy’-girls on the stage. When the morning exercise was over, all the participants would come back to their own camps to have breakfast and prepare everything to attend their own classes. In my group itself, the lecture started at 9 am and finished around 2 pm, after that I need to come back to my camp in order to have my own lunch. Between 3 – 7 pm, there were some business program classes (optional), that can be chosen by each participant—no matter what camp he or she came from—such as, Basic Russian Language class, AIESEC, jobs fair, arts class, politics class, and some other classes. All the outdoor facilities could only be used after 7 pm, so it means that before 7 pm we were not permitted to use outdoor facilities. These things were canoeing, flying fox, the lake for swimming, boating, wind-surfing, sailing, beach volleyball, outdoor gym tools, and wall-climbing. All of these things could only be used from 7 pm to 12 am. As information in summer time, the sun shines more almost 24 hours there, so it means the sun still shining even at 10-11 pm. At 1 am, all the participants were required to go to their own camps to sleep.

In Seliger we were not only trained to be good in academic, to have a ‘good-brain’, but also trained to be strong and have a good body and mind, through camp duty—each participant have their own time to work for their own camp, such as cleaning, taking water whether for drinking or washing, and preparing dishes for a whole day) and outdoor activities. Besides that, sometimes the committee brought the participants (partially) outside the camp site to the nearest forest to play a game named survival game. It taught the participants on how to be able to survive in the nature. Another kind of activity that enhanced both academic and non-academic skill was through a study tour. In this case, the committee gave the participants a chance to visit a 400 years monastery near the camp. There were also some kind of activities that actually wasn’t aimed for academic or physical improvement, but instead of that, was just for fun, such us dancing party (more like clubbing), cultural performance (since there were only 6 Indonesian delegates and we didn’t bring anything related to the traditional performance, so we couldn’t have our own performance), and several games.

The last day of this forum was closed by the visit and speech of Russian President, honorable Mr. Dimitry Medvedev. It was a very amazing experience for all of the participants, not only to be able to enjoy the beauty scenery of Lake Seliger, but also to know Russia as the whole, and to build network among the youth from around the world. It was the first time for Seliger to be opened internationally, and but I do believe that it would not be the last for it. The final words from the committee were, ” hope to see all of you here next year..” yeah hopefully…