Day 4: Learning, Discussing and Drinking

Waking up on the forth day of the seminar, we all felt enlightened by the evenings meet and greet with the Maoist politicians, which turned out just to be the Nepalese version of Helle Thorning Smith. The former Maoist Army-chief was also very formally dressed, the resemblance was astonishing to the Danish opposition leader.

The first lecture of the day was given by Mr. Anil Chitrakar, on the subject of promoting civic engagement among young people. It was a very interesting lecture using a lot of examples to inspire the participants to get involved. The examples went from Gandhi, to the tallest building in the world to The Tipping Point. All the participants felt very inspired by the lecture, especially by the point that change has always started with a few dedicated people.

The next lecture was from Mr. Rajendra Mulmi on the subject Rhetoric and Communication. It was a fun session for us, because Rajendra was the person that Mette and Christina meet with in the Philippines in 2008, which started the cooperation between Young Initiative and VU / RU. The lecture looked at one of President Obamas speeches, and also a video depicting all the classic tricks politicians uses when speaking in public. This resulted in some very good debates on how to use rhetorics, and proving to the participants that no universal answer exists on the area, it’s about discovering what technique each participant is confident with. Examples of some Bollywood actors was used, the Danish delegation didn’t really catch those references..

The participants then told us, that they would like to discuss democracy and human rights. We then arranged on optional discussion workshop, where all the participants engaged in very energetic debating. It was in Nepali, so we didn’t really get what was going on, but we were told it went very well

The participants then got time to work on their own lectures, that they have to present to the group before leaving the seminar, thus showing what they’ve learned.

In the evening we had a very nice social event, where people after dinner met for a few drinks and informal discussions in the bar. The Danes choose beers, and a few of the Nepalese followed us, even though most preferred non-alcoholic beverages (We still have work to due in terms of cultural integration). We realized that is was the birthday of one of the participants, and quickly arranged a lille birthday celebration, in which we sang a few Danish birthday songs. The celebration was unfortunately recorded by some of the participants, and we afterwards concluded, that all the Danes were really lousy singers, but at least we put some spirit into it. It’s quite sad to think about the fact, that this was our last evening together.

- Casper Henriksen