If you’ve heard of the Arab minority in Europe, Hungary might not be the country that first comes to mind, but there is a minority in Budapest. When the Euroarab project team approached AEGEE-Budapest about organising an event, the first thought was that it would be a good opportunity to organise open lectures for externals (potential members). While brainstorming on “something Arab” the members developed the concept of AEGEE-Budapest’s ‘Arab week’, which took place in the last week of November.

This ‘Arab Week’ started with a roundtable discussion on the Muslim community of Hungary. Around 30-35 participants came to listen to the discussion (about half of them were the members of AEGEE-Budapest). There were experts from the university and a leader of the Hungarian Islam Church.

The participants learned that Muslim minorities have been living in Hungary even before the Ottoman occupation. So Arab merchants and travellers had been visiting Hungary for centuries. Now, in the 21^st century the situation is very different from other -for example Western European- countries. If you ask Hungarians where they can meet ethnic Arab people, they will probably say in the hospitals as doctors, or they might know some engineers, dentists, traders and businessmen. This is because in the sixties and seventies of the 20th century, thousands of young Arabs came  to study in Hungary. Some went home after their studies, but some of them stayed – having built a family there, with a Hungarian wife/ husband and children.

Of course the Muslim community is not the same as the Arab community of Hungary. The experts explained that around two-thirds of Muslims in Hungary are ethnic Arabs or have Arabic origins. It was very interesting to hear about the different groups within and different realities of a largely unknown heterogenous community. The speakers agreed that it is possible to live according to the Islamic religious rules in Hungary, though they saw some difficulties. Most problems in the workplace, schools and other places could be solved easily, but the biggest problem is a lack of knowledge and ignorance of the ‘majority’.

Muslims have had to acknowledge that many things in their traditions and customs (even the ‘rules of praying’) depend on their cultural background. So here, in Europe the different groups have to communicate to learn from one another.

The participants listened carefully to the long discussion and also participated with some interesting questions. In the end everyone learned a lot about this heterogenous group of people that lives among us. But whether there is something like a European Islam is still hard to say. How different is this religion existing in minorities, where many historically connected cultural and traditional features are not present?

After the roundtable discussion there was an ‘Arabian night’, a house party with some Arab cookies made by members of AEGEE-Budapest. Not all the rules of the Quran were followed during the night, but some potential AEGEE members joined, and  together they played a quiz to test their knowledge of the Arabian countries.

Two days later there was a lecture on the current conflict in Syria which also included a discussion of the different groups within the Syrian society. This time there was an audience of around 45 people, and many students from different universities took part in this thematic event. The Professor explained how history affected this fragile society. Even though the Syrian civil war is often in the news, without understanding the thousand years old coexistence of Muslims and Christians, one can only have a false picture of the country.

The Arab week for AEGEE-Budapest was a huge success. With strong PR many people were reached, and during the event members of AEGEE and other students were able to learn a lot about Arab culture and the reality of this minority group.

Written by: Roland Papp (AEGEE-Budapest)

An important re-establishment of the currently-operating solid local dates back to 2009 but our antenna was originally founded in 1991 with the help of Dutch students.

AEGEE-Debrecen has around 40 members but the core team of the most active ones is smaller. What we think is special about us is that we aspire to turn our relative shortcoming of having a small team into advantages. Having a small group leaves us with a clear understanding of each other’s competences. Allocating responsibilities and tasks accordingly makes us able to turn each other into real assets for the antenna and for each other.

Another essential thing is the fun element. Although we are creative and challenge-takers, we do not forget about monitoring ourselves and each other from an outsider’s point of view and we have a great sense of criticism. We do not take ourselves too seriously and prefer not to forget about enjoying participation.

Last summer you took up the challenge of organising the European School & Summer University. 

Indeed. Imagine the first summer ever in AEGEE history when AEGEE Academy encouraged locals to organize a balanced mixture of a European School and a Summer University by merging them into one Summer Event. It was super-challenging for the organizers, trainers as well as for the participants. Yet, “European School: 4 Elements 4 You!” has been an amazingly unique experience for all of us. We rarely visit the same café the first ESSU meetings took place in, but when we do the memories still instantly put us back into that same hyper-enthusiastic mood.

This year we are organising a Travelling Summer University together with AEGEE-Sibiu. “The HungaRomanian Adventure” will be an excellent opportunity for our participants to discover the beauties of two countries: Hungary and Romania. Apart from letting participants discover true Central-Eastern-European hospitality, we will focus on introducing Romanian and Hungarian culture, more specifically by sightseeing and other outdoor activities, by trying traditional cuisine and providing insights into our languages and history. Both Northern-Eastern-Hungary and Transylvania are wonderful and we are all very excited to welcome an exceptionally diverse group of participants here.

Thus, when the Comité Directeur and the ITC issued an open call to find a hosting antenna to organize an Information Technology European School, it came naturally to apply. After our multicultural New Year’s Eve there was time to prepare. The low number of participants also further multiplied the good, cozy team spirit and enthusiasm. We believe that all the opportunities and benefits of working in the field of IT in AEGEE have been clearly presented by our guest trainers, Pavel Zborník and Maurits Korse and we hope that AEGEE-Debrecen has contributed to inspiring potential ITC members. We enjoyed the event and we would gladly do it all over again!

As a focus area in the Strategic Plan of AEGEE-Europe for the period of 2011-2014, Inclusion of Minorities aims at confronting young people with the reality of minority groups by involving them in direct personal encounters in order to create mutual understanding.

Knowing general local realities as well as witnessing the influence of recent years’ global economic and moral crisis in Hungary, we think that such projects are relevant and should be promoted. With the rise of populism and dogmatic thinking, certain minority groups are often falsely blamed for the common bad. Capitalizing on citizens’ lack of knowledge and an increasing xenophobia is pretty frequent nowadays. We hope that we will be able to organize Living Libraries in Debrecen regularly in the future to promote understanding and respect for diversity.

We consciously try our best in keeping our members updated about all the relevant information on the many opportunities AEGEE offers. Weekly local meetings, info evenings at the university, newcomers’ camps, university-based or city-wide cultural and career fairs and summer festivals – these are the regular events at which we promote our local and international activities face-to-face internally and to the external world too. The fact that we have (former) board members currently active on the European Level (Réka Salamon in Public Relations Committee, Liliána Tóth in Events Committee, Diána Leskó in The Euro-Arab Project and Nóra Abdel-Salam in The AEGEEan) makes things a bit more easy when it comes to promotion.

Although the, locally considerable, geographical distances make it quite challenging to have actual joint projects to work on and realize them together, we follow each others’ activities and help each other if we can. As it is one of the largest locals in the entire Network, we regularly have guest trainers from AEGEE-Budapest at our thematic events and at our Local Training Courses for years now. AEGEE-Debrecen members also frequently attend their events. Sharing best practices and striving for a closer national cooperation have also been among the aims of a recent Regional Training Course of Hungarian antennae organized by AEGEE-Piliscsaba in April.

Written by Patricia Anthony, AEGEE-København

Recently it was shared with our Network that the host of the AEGEE Olympics is AEGEE-León: a strong and motivated antenna that is already working hard on organising a big event for 200 people in October. The AEGEEan interviewed Daniel Garcia Rodriguez, Local Activities Responsible and Sport Responsible of AEGEE-León, in order to get to know what is going on in the life of their antenna.

Sunny León

The AEGEEan: Can you tell us a bit about your local?  

Currently we have about 100 members, and 35 of us are very motivated and active members who work every week in our sports and local activities, trips with Erasmus, thematic parties, workshops, and participating in AEGEE events in all Spain and Europe. When we talk about each other we say AEGEE-León is like our other family, and at this moment we think that is time to show it to the rest of Europe with this incredible and thrilling project “The first AEGEE Olympics with the SWG”.

You are one of the locals involved with the European Voluntary Service program. How are you involved in it and how has the experience been so far?

We are a young institution accredited in the EVS (since September 2012), as sending, hosting and coordinating organisation. We applied for our first volunteer and fortunately we got someone. She has been with us since February and will be here until June 2013.

As sending organization there were many solicitors. We have planned to send AEGEE-León members as volunteers to other countries during the next year. When you see that all your efforts are paying off, you feel good about it. The EVS is a very important opportunity to get experience, and it is a very good solution to youth unemployment and a strong training alternative in Europe. So we want to continue being in the EVS, and encourage other antennae to join it.

A Sportive version of Leoncio

Furthermore, your mascot is nominated again for the cutest mascot award for The AEGEEans Choice Awards. What makes him so popular, and do you think he will win again?

Yes, we are very proud of Leoncio. We know he will win because he has the AEGEE spirit: he travels a lot, he is a party animal, he is interested in savannah affairs and he seeks cooperation between other mascots.

Also, you are organizing the same Summer University for the third time in a row? What makes your Summer University so special, and what is changed about this year’s edition?

Our two last versions of St. James’ way were really successful, in 2011 we got the first place in the ranking, in the second version in 2012, we got the third position so the results were still amazing. This year it is a Summer Course, not a Travelling Summer University (TSU), so we will try to get even closer to environmental issues. And we want to open it for disabled people, in particular blind people. It is going to be a huge challenge but we are sure we will succeed.

León university

You are one of the locals that use sports a lot in your activities, but maybe not everybody knows about it. Please tell us how you use sports in AEGEE-León?

We use sports as an important tool to connect to our local Erasmus students. These moments of sport are one opportunity to bond with them and to promote the integration and team spirit. This way the Erasmus students can have a nice afternoon with AEGEE-León.

In implementing this, we cooperate closely to our university – they let us use their facilities to play two hours of football every Monday, two hours of basketball every Thursday and two hours of volleyball every Friday. Usually we have around 30-40 exchange students participating in these activities, and AEGEE-León members enjoy playing with them each day. Also, four to five times during the year we organise a world championship of football: one part is general (male and female) and other part is for female teams.

Which leads me to the AEGEE Games – why did you choose to apply to host the first edition of this event?

When we first heard about the AEGEE Olympics inspired games we immediately thought that it could be a very good opportunity to host an interesting sport meeting. Our faith in our strong cooperation with our university because of all the sports we already do with them, and the fact that we have many motivated and active members hoping to organise a good event lead us to develop a very good project.

The motivation of AEGEE-León is very inspriring and The AEGEEan hopes that other antennae will follow their example and focus on the thematic aspect of AEGEE, Working Groups, and strong Summer Universities.

Written by Patricia Anthony, AEGEE-København

Remember, remember the beginning of November? We were at the Agora in Budapest, discussing the CiA, participating in progress meetings about the work of the Policy Officers, motions of sadness, and AEGEE’s identity… Next to that, a lot of people and AEGEE-bodies had workshops about various interactive topics. Sometimes there were external specialists presenting a certain topic, or even preparing a whole workshop for us, the AEGEE-members.

The Human Rights Working Group(HRWG) had asked Jonathan Mack (member of TernYpe, an organisation which creates a space for young people to become active citizens, focusing on mutual respect between Roma and non-Roma youth) to have a workshop there. It was called Roma REACT, and was presented during the morning plenary on the second of November. I (Maria Arends, Speaker of the HRWG) was there, and I was looking forward to a fruitful workshop and a discussion with a group of enthusiastic members.

After ten minutes, when we were just about to wonder if we would have any participants at all (while I was explaining Jonathan that plenaries always run late, and it would probably be just fine), the first participant showed up. “Am I in the right room, is this the Roma REACT workshop?” he asked. Timidly we nodded our heads. We decided to introduce ourselves, and we started talking a bit. At some point our participant told us that he talked to some Italians, who initially thought that the workshop would be about their capital city. He explained them how it was not about the city of Rome, but about the ethnic group, so often stigmatised in a huge variety of European countries, and he added to this that he was planning on attending the workshop. The people around him asked him why he would do that, since it was about gypsies. Our participant suggested us not to use the word Roma when doing a workshop, because it scares people off.

Another five minutes later, a girl entered the room, asking if she could still join the workshop. The room was a little hard to find, that’s why she was late. We had to agree with her, since the room was quite hard to find for us as well. We continued with a nice discussion with the four of us, about how the stigmatisation actually leads to social exclusion and marginalisation, and how AEGEE could contribute to change this situation.

Now I don’t want to be negative, since I enjoyed the discussions we had, and I am very thankful to the two participants and Jonathan for being there and having this discussion, but it makes me wonder: what is going on? Why are we as AEGEEans always boasting about how inclusive we are, how we want a better Europe, and how we respect human rights, if we cannot even find it in our hearts to go to a workshop where we can learn something about a minority group that is, as stated before, stigmatised and discriminated, even by national governments in some countries? I can understand that a topic like this does not attract everyone,  so please don’t get me wrong, you don’t have to be interested. But how come, that out of 700 people, only two are interested? Is AEGEE not ready for this?

On my personal behalf, I would like to raise the discussion and ask you for your opinion.

Written by Maria Arends, AEGEE-Groningen