Autumn is the perfect season for a Network Meeting and four of them will be organized before Autumn Agora Cagliari, namely NWM Aachen, NWM Brescia, NWM Ioannina and NWM Kharkiv. With an interesting name (“AEGEE – Your drug from commonness”), NWM Kharkiv will definitely explore how addictive the AEGEE world is. We spoke with Tetiana Shcherbyna, coordinator of NWM Kharkiv 2014 and Incoming responsible of AEGEE-Kharkiv, and their Network Commissioner (or Natcom, as they call her) Natalia Ivleva (AEGEE-Voronezh) to discover some of their secrets.
AEGEE-Kharkiv was brought to a second life in 2011 when four active girls who came back from a Summer University decided to give a new fresh boost to the local. NWM Kharkiv was supposed to be already organized in Spring 2014, but due to the instable situation in that part of Ukraine, it was moved to Lviv. However, this sudden change didn’t discourage the Eastern Ukrainian local to apply again for hosting the Autumn NWM and they effort paid off.
As it was mentioned above, the NWM has a unique title: “AEGEE – your drug from commonness”. As Tetiana says, “the title describes the meaning of such phenomena that AEGEE is. What is it? When you are tired from commonness, you feel bored and mad for travelling, AEGEE is the drug that can treat you.”
Natalia echoes: “Just imagine. You came back from your vacations/holidays or any other sort of trip. You try to start again you ordinary life with university, job, housetasks, and you feel that the day is almost the same as the previous one. This is exactly what we called commonness. But when you are in AEGEE you can find a lot of opportunities to make you life more active, find some projects which help you to realize every single one of your crazy ideas.”
Regarding the content, the main goal for NetCom Natalia is to give the participants all the means they need to understand better all the opportunities that AEGEE can give to its members. “We want to present all the AEGEE projects to participants, talk a bit about the history of AEGEE, discuss and share our experience of keeping members motivated and how to stay motivated for new projects”. This NWM will serve as preparation for the Agora. Even if Natalia will prepare their locals mainly by discussing proposals and candidates on-line, she plans to give an “Agora speed course explaining the general rules of an Agora, the different roles of participants and types of session such as plenaries and prytannia”.
Around 25 participants will be expected from the countries belonging to Natalia’s Network, namely Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Armenia, but organizers are expecting people from the entire Network to “show them our amazing city”. The current situation in Ukraine, since Kharkiv is located in the Eastern part of the country and relatively close to the area where the situation is particulary tense, can raise some concerns over the stability in the region.
As Tetiana says, “of course, you can never be exactly sure about the future, but thank God there is no war here. We hope that situation will not influence participants and they will come to our NWM to have a chance to support Ukraine, too”.
Unfortunately NWM Kharkiv won’t have the University or the Local Municipality support but they are cooperating with a “local youth organization called “The youth change the world” and we are trying to establish cooperation with other organizations to involve not only our members on events but other volunteers as well”.
Written by Erika Bettin, AEGEE-Venezia