I mean MaLaJo ❤

Erasmus+ projects are getting more popular by every day - that’s a fact. Well, facts are good and we all love them, but we always like to check out on some of them. Be it for the sake of real verification of what was said, to learn something new or simply to have some fun – it’s who we are. So, to do the “verification”, we embarked on a journey to the beautiful mountain countryside of Zakopane, Poland during the warm summer days of July, 2016. It was, before we got to know anything else, a chance to at least attenuate the feeling of heat and constant sweating we were encountering in our countries/cities. And it really worked! But hey, believe it or not, enjoying the weather was the last on our list (also, let it be known, it was a bit rainy!) because the activities we passed through and the people we got to know “rented” our attention for a whole 10 days which challenged us, expanded our knowledges and perspectives to, in the end, motivate us to write this reportage.

One place, 6 countries (Poland, Slovakia, Croatia, Italy, Romania, Spain), 10 days, 36 people. The Polish Tatra mountains are a really nice place to see (fact checked and confirmed by millions!) but, in the same time, they represent a perfect location for these types of projects which are based on teamwork, mutual help and understanding while sometimes having to leave the comfort zone. You live in the same cottage/inn/hotel during the whole project with all the participants, you dine together, you use foreign languages in every kind of situation and you are in a position in which you can act, grow and mature. The participants are frequently young, ambitious people who have one sole goal – TO LEARN. And learning is one of the foundations of Erasmus+ projects so we could say that we’ve got a pretty good combination here.

But let’s get a bit more detailed, shall we? Our hotel (which is called “Wila Jozef”) is located in the already mentioned Tatra mountains in the city of Zakopane. A really nice place, it had good, clean rooms (even equipped with a TV!) which varied from 2 to 4-bed ones. Immediately upon our arrival we experienced the touch of Erasmus+ on our newbie skins by being assigned a task of sharing a room with a person we just met in the bus who was, at the same time, from a foreign country. Through this, we are sure, the comfort zones of some of the participants had been breached. With that being done, the rooms being found and taken, the project could start. Our “workplace” was situated a couple of meters from the hotel, in a typical Polish mountain wooden cottage which, we admit, will be deeply missed. It was a place of hard work before anything else; we passed through innumerous workshops, took part in a bunch of activities, had some unforgettable energizers (and, when it was needed, punishments), learned a lot of new ways of expressing and taking a stand for ourselves and got to meet people with different perspectives, histories and knowledges.

How the project was born

To find out how this project was created, we talked with the “brains” of the association that brought us here, Marcin and Ola from the European Center for Youth Initiatives. According to them, planning this project was a very long process. Marcin wrote down the first ideas in August 2015 and then, every time some new things came into their minds, they put them on paper. The deadline was on February 2016, but actually it all started during one of their projects, when a participant from Italy also spoke Polish. He gave them the idea of maybe making a project with languages and letting the people learn them. Later, they added journalism to this idea to make it more interesting. Their goal was to promote non-formal education and Erasmus+ possibilities.

 Marcin told us about the problems of non-formal education and why they decided to start this project: “I was posting about this everywhere and talking with student committees at the universities to let students know about the possibilities, but some people were still surprised that they exist”. According to Ola, people weren’t trusting them, so they came up with something that is not actually made by them, but by the participants of the project. That way, people believed in this project more, because the story was not being told by the organizers, but by the participants themselves, by those who were part of a team with one great result.

That result is a final brochure, which gathers the work of the participants from all 6 countries. Shaped in versions translated in all six languages, in order to promote it in every participant country, the brochure has the aim to clarify what was the project about, what non-formal education is, how to use non-formal education and what kind of possibilities exist through it.

Biggest challenges

When gathering 36 different people from 6 countries for only 10 days, problems can appear. But MaLaJo was an exception, according to the organizers. The most important challenge for them was the integration of the participants, but the participants solved that themselves. After only two days of the project, they were integrated and were working together, being involved, even without the implication of Marcin and Ola, nobody was feeling bad in the company of another and they were a real team, not only a group. “We had the impression that they knew each other before, even though before they only had contact through Facebook”, Marcin told us.

Results    

According to Ola, the biggest result was that everybody worked and they were happy to do it. “I was impressed that nobody gave up, nobody said that they are not going to do something because they are not able or because they don’t want to do it, everybody worked as a big team. For us it is the best result because people are growing and developing.

The goals were the exchange of languages, ideas, knowing cultures, building a team and, as organizers said, and some of them were reached and some are on the best road. According to Marcin and Ola, the biggest goal that they reached is that they showed people that they can do anything they want, that they should believed in themselves more. That wasn’t the official goal, but it´s much more satisfying.

All in all, MaLaJo´s most important result is the learning outcome. It´s about what people gain for themselves: changing their attitude, being more open, being more able to do something and getting experience.