Wednesday, July 18, 2012

I appreciated the atmosphere of trust, mutual understanding and respect.


by Asya Malamyan
One of the Armenian participants of the seminar on Lessons of Liberalism in Bazaleti, Georgia, Asya Malamyan, is sharing with us her impressions and opinion about the event and the liberal atmosphere there. From the first day she was actively engaged in the exciting working process of the groups and as a result currently Asya is one of the new active members in LYNC and will contribute to the works of our youth initiative. We warmly welcome Asya and other new members from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, who joined LYNC after Bazaleti.

LYNC team
From 29th of June till the 1st of July in Bazaleti Lake, Georgia took place a seminar dedicated to Liberalism: Communication and Governance, organized by German Friedrich Naumann Foundation in cooperation with VVD (Dutch Liberal Party) and LYNC(Liberal Youth Network of the South Caucasus). As a participant, I must mention, that the event was organized in the highest level. The trainers were very professional and the topics were covered for one hundred percent. In the agenda we had such topics as liberal values, strengths of liberalism, weaknesses of liberalism, principles of consensus, social media etc.

The training sessions were full of new information, knowledge and fun, as well as theory and practical exercises.
Team building games were playing very important role for fulfilling the workshops that we had in our agenda. They both helped us to get to know each other better and to raise the trust among participants.

One thing that was especially appreciated by me was the atmosphere of trust, mutual understanding and respect. Participants were from South Caucasus region: Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan. Though this region is considered to be a conflicting one, not even a single case of misunderstanding was noticed among participants. Despite the political and economic instability in the region liberal youth of all three countries managed to work in very diverse groups and successfully complete all the workshops.


Besides the knowledge and a lot of fruits for thought that this seminar gave us, let’s not forget about the real fun we had in Bazaleti. These 4 days were unforgettable not only in the context of knowledge, but also in human relationship, friendship, trust through diversity, tolerance and respect of that is different. Frankly speaking this was my first “tête-à-tête” interaction with participants from our region. It was rather strange for me. Especially when in this kind of seminars I used to stay with members of our (Armenian) team, but this time I was sharing a room with a very nice Azerbaijani girl, Yegane, and that was very interesting. The way almost all of the participants were dancing under Armenian national music – qochari and Azerbajani music in a bus on our way back was really amazing. This was our first but hopefully not the last teamwork together.


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