(en) France, Alternative Libertaire AL dossier spécial sur
l'éducation populaire - International Exchanges: Tourists we? Never
(fr, it, pt) [machine translation]
Tourism and travel is easy. Actually meet across borders, it is much less. For nearly a
decade, Ceméa Pays-de-la-Loire trying reciprocal and united international meeting.
Experiences to laugh together, cause of our countries and our cultures but also upset
daily life. ------------ "Mobility", it crosses everywhere. In studies or at work, you
have to be able to move, adapt. But this "mobility" is certainly not the same for
everyone. For part of European youth, middle-class, international experience has become a
rite of passage, a more essential on the resume. It can take several forms: year Erasmus,
internship abroad, post-break year ... This mobility is chosen and accompanied,
experienced as a fundamental moment of self-construction. ---- In another part of youth
mobility is experienced and precarious: the migration to employment areas, the need to
move away from its Friends and family in order to gain some gold coins or finding housing.
Internationally, this injustice is multiplied by 100: the flow of tourists in a sense,
that of migrant women, migrants and exiled es in the other. In between, a set of devices
repression and death called borders. Ease of growing movement for some accompanies the
proliferation of camps and walls to contain the others.
Ceméa to Pays-de-la-Loire, the youth exchange project - with Italy, Germany, Palestine or
Tunisia - confront these questions in action: twenty young meet for ten days. Young people
who do not necessarily depart usual, for whom foreign travel is not a routine.
Prepare to welcome home
Youth exchanges are to ask all the questions we have on our lives, on the relationship
with our families, on our worldview and religion in all this, and work, poverty, police
loose us rarely, music ...
But it's not so simple to build a group when one is twenty, who do not necessarily share
the same household habits or the same rhythm in the day ... Meet, is also building a daily
life together, do not stepping on toes, talk. Popular education also passes here, through
experimentation of a collective that is neither the family nor an institution.
All this with a reciprocity requirement. When we went somewhere, he must be prepared to
welcome home, fighting with the prefectures to bring people and they can also experience this.
Of course, not everything is rosy, these exchanges drain their share of questions: what
compromises with the institutions to make all this possible? How to conduct egalitarian
projects when our starting points are not at all? How not to reproduce the tourist sense
and create long-term relationships?
But perhaps that bringing the issues it is ultimately the most important. Exit certainty
to move forward, there as here.
Roma activist Cemeas
Stories, photos on http://international.cemea-pdll.org
http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?Echanges-internationaux-Touristes
