Monday Afternoon : World Cup !!!

This is legend.

This is what we’ve expected all IJBC long.

This is what we came for.

THIS IS WORLD CUP !!!

Background : At every IJBC, the most important and intense session is not a presentation, nor a sim game, nor even Marcos striptease. It is a soccer game. Usually played by Europe vs Rest Of The World (that’s what happened also this year), it’s the craziest 1h sport time you’ve ever seen. Just imagine 100 people runnning after a goddamn ball trying to score even if they don’t know where to score at (right Monika ? ;-D ).

After a 20 mins walk we arrived to a very beautiful football field. We formed both teams, Europe and ROTW, and let the match begin !

What happened then ? Well, it’s actually blur to all of us…People were running…Girls were cheering…Julien scored…and scored again..and Marcin scored the third goal…And suddenly it was over.

We had actually a live reporter on the field, here is his report :

Liveblogging the World Cup

Greetings world from a soccer pitch somewhere in Florence. Don’t ask me where it is…the Italian staff made sure that we were nice and lost on the trip here. It’s near a church…that’s about all I can tell you.

Blogging today are Martin, NJR from the USA, who is currently on injured reserve after a nasty incident involving slippery wet stone and a bad knee as well as a few special guests. At the beginning of the game, Martin is joined by Clementine from France.

The game is about to begin and both sides are exchanging taunts at midfield.

Europe won the coin toss and starts with the ball.

Three European girls immediately get to work distracting the World’s goalie Silas. He brushes them off and pays attention to the game in front of him.

Clemzi from France falls down dramatically.

Europe shoots on goal and it goes wide resulting in a free kick for the World.

Julien from France kicks the ball out of bounds.

Juanma from Colombia clears a European attack

Julien from France scores the first goal. He then proceeds to prance around the field.

The score is now Europe 1 Rest of the World 0.

The ball stays in midfield…It’s a battle of wits as 70 JBers clump together in a battle to see who can touch the ball so they can claim they helped their team during the game.

The clump clears the ball into the Rest of the World’s side…Silas the goalie clears the ball out of bounds. The ball is cleared into the Euro zone after the throw.

Clement from France makes a great pass to the girls watching the game from the sideline out of bounds.

The European girls continue to try and distract Silas in the goal. Chris from Australia joins the group to provide moral support to Silas.

The Rest of the World shoots on goal. Olivier the Frenchman saves it at the last minute.

Julien from France tries another shot. It goes way wide and almost leaves the pitch.

First water break—Marcos the IJR proclaims “I NEED A BEER!”

The IJBC World Cup liveblog is joined by Frank from Belgium. He’ll be providing his pearls of wisdom alongside Martin and Clem.

Some EJB females use soccer cones to dance and cheer in a cheerleading-esque manner.

Jose from Guatemala walks around on the sidelines.

IJR Kelly walks along the sidelines proclaiming that we should solve this whole World Cup business using consensus instead of soccer.

With the help of some fancy footwork and what’s sure to be looked at as cheating, Europe scores again. Never mind the fact that they tripped the goalie and three defenders in the process…

Score now Europe 2, ROW 0

ROW changes goalies. George from Kenya is now in goal.

Blogger Clem goes wild to the sound of Seven Nation Army.

George saves a shot. Wooo!

Adrienne from the USA takes out Clement from France, in what is sure to be a blow to his manhood.

End of the first half…score: Europe 2, ROW 0. Marcos asks “WHERE IS THE BEER?”

With me during the half is Hani from Lebanon. He complains about the fact that his country is always a part of the Rest of the World. He also expresses a need for beer, as it is what powers many of the players on the ROW team.

Half time is over…the Europeans have finished their cigarettes and are now huddling in the middle of the field. Martin opens up his second Coke Light. The ROW starts chanting “GAME TIME” in their huddle. Alex from Canada walks by the press booth.

As the game begins, the blog is joined by Dani from Costa Rica.

America kicks off and the ball is sent into a group of people.

_____ from Denmark decides to slap the ball. Even the Americans know that this is against the rules.

Hana from Egypt dances on the field.
Camilla from Denmark limps off the field. Apparently she fell down, but no one saw her do it.

Kathy from Canada is forced down in a Euro-Canadian collision and decides to take a page from the Europeans and make it as dramatic as possible.

Tore from Denmark kicks the ball at Kelly the IJR

Silas makes a wonderful catch in the goal and passes the ball toward the Euro zone.

The Colombians and Brazilians are pretty good at soccer.

BT from Brazil makes a shot on goal that goes over the goal, over the protective net, and into a car in the parking lot. If this was baseball, it would have been a home run.

At this point in time, the only person seriously dedicated to doing this whole blogging the football game thing, Martin, is asked  by one of the home staff to serve as referee for the rest of the game. At this point there is a break in the blog…

Europe scores again, making the score 3-0. Unfortunately, during this time the ROW is unable to get many attacks together and are shut out during the game. Choosing an ignorant-to-the-rules-of-Soccer American with a bad knee as a referee was a poor choice—many people on both teams lamented that Martin was the worst referee in IJBC World Cup history…a fact of which he is very proud.

And so it is…as both teams began the long trek back to the AIM site, many were left wondering: has the stage has been set for an Americas/ROW comeback in Guatemala next year? Only time will tell.

So yeah, you’re not dreaming, EUROPE WON 3-0 !!! Finally ! After three years of bad luck, Europe finally reclaimed its legendary soccer supremacy

We took time to make some italian boys beleive BT was Ronaldinho’s brother, and then we left, with a lot of pride in our hearts (we even sang the European anthem as our hymn, how cool ?).

Thanks to everyone for this amazing game, we really had a lot of fun playing it.

Martin (USA) and Clemzi

Monday Morning and Afternoon : Global Movement

"What did you think about... ?"

These two sessions have been the very last ones of IJBC. We tried here to wrap up everything we said, did, wrote during the whole meeting, to arrive to some kind of a conclusion.

Then it was the famous Evaluation time, which was a bit chaotic as it was the very end of IJBC, some folks were about to leave us, etc… so we were not very focused 🙂

Plus, we were waiting for next session…

Randomness #2

Another day, another random fact.. people I really get excited about the most random facts.
And by the way do you know what random means? If you don’t know I will enlighten you …

random |ˈrandəm|
adjective
made, done, happening, or chosen without method or conscious decision : a random sample of 100 households.
• Statistics governed by or involving equal chances for each item.
• (of masonry) with stones of irregular size and shape

We're all children in the end

Signs… signs are really cool – they give you information, they let you know what is going around you, and sometimes they can also make you really confused.

And as I said in the other article there are a lot of signs in the site where we are.In one of my random moments during this IJBC/AIM I found this sign. I don’t know what to think about it. Please let me know what you think about it.

George, Jorge, Giorgio, Jeorg, Gerges, Yrjö, Jirka, Joji, Jerzy, Gyorgy. (Just randomly pick a name to fill in the black spaces)
………… is a guy that comes every night to the square where we all hang out.

…………… is a quite random person, is kind of an Amy Winehouse, but without the singing skills,

………. he just spend is entire night drinking, probably really really cheap drinks,

……..he usually arrives around 7pm and if you look for …….. around 2am in the morning, you will probably find him with his drinks but not as accurate as he as was at 7pm.

……… also does another random thing , and this is the reason why he is included in this random article. ……….. tries to sell drugs to everyone, but the thing is that the drugs are actually just pieces of normal grass that he dries and then put thems in a bag.

And now you ask how do I know about this random fact, it’s just because ………. is quite a celebrity in Florence and everyone knows about his random drug-pushing techniques.
So random friends see you tomorrow for another random moment is this random world that is IJBC/AIM!

Randomna

Sunday Night : Cowboys Party !

Line Dance !

Get your hat and boots on, cause it’s Cowboys and Cowgirls Party we’re talkin about !

For this last IJBC Night, Italian homestaff had planned us some cool and stupid cowboys games we had a lot fun playing while listening to dirty country music. I must say we were the first ones to cheat so we basically won the two races 😉 .

Then Mighty Lizzie from GB JB managed to have almost all of us dance her famous Line Dance ; these crazy british dances are now officially a must in every IJB Party ! Thanks Lizzie about the fun .

Also, at 12pm we celebrated Cutie Cecily birthday : she just turned 16, how sweet ?

Clemzi (FRA)

Sunday Afternoon : Global Movement

Hana and Marcos had prepared a very nice slideshow to make us aware of what a Global movement is, and how we as IJB can be a Global movement. The best way to make you get it is actually… to see it !

Click on the slide to open it, enjoy.

Click me !

Another very good example of a global movement event is a freeze. To get what it really is, I encourage you to watch this amazing video :

We really think we can adapt this freeze idea to any kind of CISV Event, the most obvious being Peace Day events. What about freezing with explicative T-Shirts on us ? Or freezing while handing fliers ? Think about it, and if you do it, record it !

We love you.

Clemzi

Sunday Afternoon : Parallel Experiences #2

Maximising your Potential

Day 1:
What does your JB look like? Do you achieve the JB goals? What would your ideal junior branch look like? Hana from Egypt, Kelly from Canada and Louise from Sweden asked us to think about what an ideal JB would include..what would it look like, what would we do? What to we need to do to achieve this perfect JB?

Then they left us to think about that for a day..

Day 2:
Who is a junior? What do they look like? Are we really an inclusive community or do we select who we have in our JB? How do we best maximise JBs potential – do we try and reach out to as many people as we possibly can? Can we reach every person in the world somehow? Can we get all of them to be a part of JB? Is that what we want to do? Surely we just want everyone to have the option of being part of JB? And then what? Are we strong enough to host programmes for all these people?

And what if we reach out, continuously aiming to encourage our juniors to go out into the world and interact with other organisations, using the leadership skills CISV has taught them, building friendships and communication between organisations and finding out what they could offer, could a consequence of this be that they join other organisations and leave CISV, so that in ten years time there might be no-one left? We would of course have been successful in achieving the goals to act, and to become contributing members of a peaceful society, but as an organisation?

Interesting thoughts..

Despite this immense pessimism (!) in the group, we did also talk about how working with other organisations gives something back to us and shouldn’t be seen as something we do just for the sake of it, but as something that we use to help us grow in JB and develop our and our juniors skills in the process..which it can.

We’re the limit, not the sky.

Louisa – GB

CISV Most Mythical Myth

Some people call it an urban CISV myth. Some people trace back its history all the way to the most powerful secret societies of history. And some people think, just like Rou (Egyptian Junior NJR) said: “It simply does not exist” .

What is it that we are talking about? Is it the 22nd century Free Masons society or one of those Dan Brown secret religious societies? Not at all!

It’s something dangerous. It’s something that threatens each and everyone in every Junior Branch and can ruin lives. It is more powerful then any weapon that mankind can come up with…

It’s a deadly weapon and it’s called: Gossip!

Did Florence witness a historical CISV event that would go down in history, myth history, for generations to come? Was the IGC working its strings inside IJBC?   IGC… no, that is not one of those boring committees of CISV. International Gossip Committee. It was stalking us, observing every move we make and taking notes.

And now, it’s getting ready to come up once again with it’s worse creation: THE G LIST!  The existence of this committee is still uncertain to most – even after the IGC facebook group incident. I was nearly threatened one night around 4 am in the morning on the stairs of the closed AIM site and was advised to: “Drop it”.

I still haven’t decided where to go from here, but I know one thing for sure: IGC or no IGC, the G WORD is terrorizing the young and innocent minds of many IJBers who were present in Florence and all over the world.

Hani – Lebanon

Flash info : IJR Election result

Hi juniors of the world.

Just a quick note out of chronology to tell you that we just had IJR Elections.

As you know the two candidates were Hana from Egypt and Maru from Argentina.

Maru has been elected as the next IJR. Congrats to her, and good luck in her 2 years work.

Sunday Morning : Guest Talks

We had this morning the chance to have 3 sessions proposed by three amazing couples : James (ex IJR) and Natalie, Astrid and Juan Ca (both ex IJR), and Per (Mosaic Chair) and Adam (Executive trustee). Here are three reports of these three sessions.

Inaction is a weapon of mass distraction

The guest talks session was amazing. We had so many wonderful people around IJBC and AIM including past IJRs, people who are very knowledgeable about JB and people who have a lot of experience in the organization. The session I attended was given by Astrid and Juan Ca, two past IJRs who are generally inspiring people and drove us to think about why we should go outside the box/bubble we are in within CISV and to get CISV to make a real impact in the world today. All we need is a good idea and the motivation and the energy to do.

Rou (Egypt)

Global Leadership
Per and Adam (both from Sweden) – for sure I’ll remember those guys, ‘cause they did a great job presenting their point of view about the global leadership & how this issue is important for the whole CISV Community.

After making-you-think presentation with cool graphs (visit gapminder.com to see some) we started a discussion about how to find knowledge and bring it to CISV. And you know what ? We already have this knowledge or an easy access to it. Every each of us has own life apart of CISV.

So there is Yin (CISV) as well as Yang – studies, internships , voluntaries, NGOs, movements and acting groups of people involved in many projects making our world a better place to live. We can and we should use the experience & knowledge that we find outside of CISV to improve our organisation and forge new generations of leaders who are not afraid of asking questions and taking actions  – CISV leaders !
So, what’s your Yang ?

Marcin (Poland)

What is violence ?

James and Natalie offered us the chance to think about it for one hour during their Guest talk session.

After everyone of us shared with the group how we may work for non violence in everyday life, they gave us a series of conecpts that may be described as violent, and to rate them relatively : Which one is the most violent ? Which one the less ? Death Penalty and Air raids were easy to sort, what about Divorce ? Circumcision ? Tom and Jerry cartoons ?
After the usual discussion about what we felt, James proposed us a definition of violence from Paulo Freire’s book « Pedagogy of the oppressed » :

« Any situation in which A objectively exploits B or hinders his or her pursuit of self affirmation as a responsible person is one of oppression.
Such a situation in itself constitutes violence, even when sweetened by false generosity, because it interferes with the individuals vocation to be more fully human.
With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun ».

As you can guess, this made us react a lot. Thanks to James and Natalie for sharing this with us.

Dirty Feet and the International Sweat Perfume

There’s great food, purposeful coffee and a lot of people doing a lot of work. But what does this place feel like? What do our senses pick up from our surroundings? How do the participants drink up what’s going on in such an intense environment? I’m here to guide you through the textures of the conference you can’t find in the minutes.

So lets start with some of our senses. Remember there are over 100 people at this years IJBC so surely that means sweaty feet?  Well actually I got told it was more like “people in action” (Dhvani-India) or “Grass when it rains.” (Pya-Indonesia). I wondered if we smelt different to outsiders, so I asked Ico from the International Mosaic Committee and he could only describe it as “International Multi-sweat” which I think would be a fair comment and a good reflection of how hard we’ve been working. The most interesting smell was described by the Mosaic Committee’s alternate chair Enrico who told me ” It’s a good smell, it’s like perfume. If you think about perfume it’s a sophisticated process to make it, many people have to work to make IJBC work so it’s just as sophisticated.”

Next, let me turn the volume up on our meeting. Dario (Italy) said, “It sounds like a river, sometimes running sometimes it meanders and other times it goes from a waterfall to a murmur.” Maru (IJR Candidate) didn’t think quite the same and described it as a rainy rock concert with a wide range tempo and a range as varied as jazz music.” Well, take from the combination what you like but the reference to water might have something to the heat of Florence and the need for water.

Next I wanted to explain how we’re living in 3 different hotels near to the site where we work. Some are closer than others but our hotels are where we have breakfast. I asked our delightful IJR Kelly (Canada) to enlighten us on what the deal is. “Well, there’s lots to chose from. There’s an intense coffee vibe and I had no sugar yogurt this morning. The peach yogurt is really gross, but then I found the other flavours and they’re delicious. I’m not quite sure why but they refrigerate the fruit.” There is some debate about the juice machine and the colouring of the product. Sakari (Finland) is rumoured to have said: “I have come to believe that this is orange juice”, which is actually in fact red in colour.

I asked the French NJRs– Mathilde and Guillaume to summarise in three words IJBC. Mathilde said, ” Unfair, inspiring and productive.” and Guillaume went with “New, intense and split”. I think I could have asked this question to every member of the IJBC and would probably of heard three different words from all of them. The point is that there is no right and wrong. The feelings and the perception of our meeting, the insight into what we are eating and hearing and seeing, I could never try to summarise because it quite simply isn’t possible. Everyone here has a different interpretation of what their surroundings mean to them.

If you asked me what visual image I’m going to take from this year, it’s rows and group and gatherings of hard working people but with feet dirtier than you’d care to imagine.

Lizzie – GB