turkish-greek civic dialogue - AEGEE Europe

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we have a look at the poster of the festival. You see a balloon here. All these
happy melodies and the birds of course. We met some new friends and had
a nice cooperation with the Denizli Foundation. I will like to mention about
some articles written right after the festival, there are great articles written
by Serdar Degirmencioğlu – lecturer at Bilgi University Psychology Department.
He was our leader in psychology workshop in KayaFest. I am so thankful for
AEGEE-Ankara and people involved in the project participants, observers; I
think it somehow worked out.
Burcu Becermen: “In the previous session we had academic/ political somehow
more in-depth discussions about the assessment of the overall project. They
are somehow directly related about the project and indirectly related about
general opinions what going on in Turkey, Greece and Cyprus. But personally
what excites me most is to receive opinions of NGOs participated in our project
as they are our real target group. I am very happy to have here Fotini, Katerina
and Necmettin to have their opinions about the KayaFest.”
Sophia Kompotiati: “The first time I heard about this project was in Amsterdam,
when I met friends from AEGEE-Ankara. Then I said okey it sounds interesting.
We can do something. It was two and half years ago. I could never believe what
would follow. I cannot believe the things that happened during the last two and
half years when we started this effort. Making many phone calls, many travels,
many ideas, some disagreements, some fights amongst us, too much stress for
these results. I am not going to evaluate whether the result is good or bad, but
I must say that it had a deep influence for me from Greece. First of all, I was
alone and secondly I was a volunteer without any experience for such project.
You might consider it as a youth event but all this huge project became an
official European Commission project that I haven’t realized before.
I want to evaluate it both as a project and how we did as our project as
a Turkish-Greek dialogue project. As a project there were some mistakes or
problems in the organisation. Many difficulties especially for my work in Athens,
because I was alone and no one took me seriously when I was calling embassies,
looking for money, striving for promotion and nobody was helping. At the end,
everybody says that we will help but at the beginning nobody helps. Sometimes
it was really disappointing.
As a project of gathering of young people from Greece and Turkey I think we
did quite well. I tried to promote the project in all the universities in all the
secretariats, in all technical universities and NGOs in Greece. It wasn’t so easy,
the result was good. In all events were attended at least by 50 young people.
I think this is a success! The biggest surprise was few months ago, they called
me from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Greece. We haven’t talked with them
before. I was a bit low profile in Greece so they called me to discover who I am,
whether I am an agent or not.”
Final Conference Association des Etats Généraux des Etudiants de L’Europe