We are participating in an Erasmus+ youth exchange in Torri Superiore, Italy, co-funded by the European Union 🙏🏼.
Young boys and girls aged between 13-17 met Saturday, July, 19th and we will keep working until the 26th of July. We are coming from Italy (youth4youth), Malta (Right2smile), Hungary (Mentàl Manko’), Serbia (Altero) and we are being hosted by the Ecovillage Torri Superiore. They are a community of volunteers and residents who live together and share every day life decisions to help their self sufficiency.
In the morning we got divided into the 4 working groups.
🐈 The Cats were assigned to the drywall building. Daniel, who helps around in the ecovillage community, showed the group how a rubble wall is built and how intricate the process is. The group was divided and some of them were in charge of building the wall, whilst others were collecting stones around the olive trees.
🐑 Sheep: dissemination
🐄 Cows: evening animation
🐓 Chicken: agriculture
After the tiring but very fulfilling morning, our phones were collected and stored away for us to be in completely by ourselves with no distractions (not even company 🥲).
During this half an hour, everyone had a chance to relax and reflect on themselves. This was very useful as it helped us to get ready for the rest of the day’s challenges.
The amazing meals are prepared by the ecovillage’s volunteers, mainly they served a mixture of different pastas, many kinds of vegetables grown by themselves, and sometimes meat. They are very open to abiding by peoples specific food requirements since they are vegetarians and can better understand people’s needs.
After lunch, the first activity started as a “school lesson” 😰 on the italian painter Arcimboldo and his portraits depicting each season through nature’s products in that period. Luckily, it developed into a fun artsy project: in groups, we were given some vegetables, fruits, seeds and flowers to make a portrait or anyone of our choosing, just like the Italian artist Arcimboldo.
We took a short break and returned in the main room were soft music was playing. Roberta, one of the Italian facilitators, guided the warm up by making us move each separate part of our body and then, we started moving as the four natural elements: stomping strong as the earth, moving swiftly as the air, impulsive as fire, trickling like water.
Luckily every day there is an allocated time for us to speak in our own language with our national team. This moment is used to discuss and reflect on the activities of the day and how comfortable each of us are feeling around the other participants.
The cow group were in charge of the evening animation and did a great job 😃 They proposed playing a game that is famous all around the world and therefore has many different names: Lupus in fabula, Everyone is sleeping, Alszik a vàros… In the end, we collectively decided to call it Mafia.
The game is about a village with different farm animals and every night, wolves kill some sheep. Thankfully there are other animals that can help them. The main aim of the game is to survive and to figure out who the wolves are… AND WE MADE IT!!!
This is all for now from Agritopia Youth Exchange 😉 Stay tuned for more!!
Lucia (Italy), A’bris and Petra (Hungary), Kristina (Serbia) , Thomas and Leona (Malta)
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