At first it was a great feeling to go to a Conference and to meet 8 other people that are representing some of the member organizations of Active. That lead to having 9 people from the same umbrella organization, among a total number of 21 participants to the Conference.
We had a lot of discussions, presentations, workshops, as to any other event. Personally I think that it could have been better if we focused a bit more on specific issue and work on it, than just to talk about more problems that are concerning us and finish with our ideas of what we personally, our organizations and our governments should do. But anyway, maybe they have a long term plan of activities and this was just a beginning. At least we had fun.
What was more fascinating for me was the possibility and the running of the discussions.
One thing that is famous about Active people is that we talk. YES we talk a lot and that is good! We always want to express our opinion, which very often is different than the opinion of the majority. And that was noticeable also on the Conference, even though all organizations there had similar goals.
Especially on the last discussion, we had one guy that was presenting the work of his organization in Budapest that was offering help to addicted people to make them feel better, hoping it will lead to lowering the amount of drugs they are using. In the same time, while talking about addictions, he compared the coffee with alcohol and other drugs. After his presentation was over and the time for questions and comments came, I could see the hands only from the people of Active. It felt good! We all started commenting and expressing our totally different opinions. The other participants were being quite, while the guy who was presenting started to feel uncomfortable. Suddenly the prep team interrupted our discussion and didn’t allow us to ask any more questions or add comments. “We don’t have any more time” was their answer, but right after that, one of them had a short speech when he explained that sometimes we can be very critical, but no body should get offended because we live in an open society and we have the right to express our opinion.
My reaction was What?!?! Should we be sorry if we have different opinions?! Should we be quiet?! No! It is our personal obligation to stand up and say out loud what we think. How are we going to change something, if we don’t have other perspective?!
One famous philosopher, Karl Popper once said
“You can never learn something from a person that only agrees with you!”
I use this sentence very often and I agree with him.. =)
However, I enjoyed the discussions. I liked the thing that people from Active were on the same thought and I hope we managed to influence other people as well.
And YES, we had fun!
Sanja
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