… Only with young people!

Yesterday evening I went to hear a lecture by Paul Nolte, a German professor (with a background in history and sociology) and leading intellectual. Some time ago (well, it must actually be a year or two ago already), I found one of his books and read it with great interest. The book was called “Generation Reform” and provided a couple of – in my opinion - very good thoughts and ideas about the future of the German state. Because the book was so inspiring to me, I really wanted to go and hear him speak.

His lecture was called “The price of chances - About the economy of a new citizen society” and was organized by the Körberstiftung as part of their “Körberforum”, which is subtitled “For people, who don’t want to leave everything as it is” : ) His lecture was basically divided into four parts. In the first part, he outlined the different values and guiding principles of the citizen society over the last three decades and especially how they changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall (basically in the 80ies, citizen society (or civil society as you might also call it) existed as a form of self-organization against the power of the state, whereas in the early 90ies the state wasn’t seen as enemy anymore; citizen engagement started to be was seen as “activities of individuals in social networks”).

The second part focused on the relation between the citizens and the state. For Germany, Paul Nolte identified four important “crisis”, which have a huge influence on our society:

1. The crisis of the consumer society (consummation past its peek at the end of the 80ies and is since declining)
2. The crisis of the tax state (people are less willing to pay more and more taxes but at the same time are less aware of the rising costs of public services)
3. The crisis of the welfare state (growing state debt since the 70ies and a growing feeling of people to give more than to receive)
4. The crisis of the public sphere (people are retreating into privacy and democracy is not res publica anymore, but rather seen as a political system that should ensure as much freedom of privacy as possible).

In the third part of his lecture, Paul Nolte presented his idea of the new “innovative citizen society”. Instead of being just mere consumers of resources and having a lot of expectations to gain from the state and others, people should invest more into society again and also show more solidarity. Everyone should ask themselves: “What can I do as an individual to serve the society I live in?” The whole concept is based on a sustainable and more long-term approach: innovations that are made today will bring benefits tomorrow – this is something that people seem to have forgotten. One good example is that in Germany, parents are not willing anymore to invest in the education of their children if that means that they have to cut down their own standard of living (not to mention that investing in education is generally “out” so to say – something that I know from my own experience with my mum).

Lastly, in the fourth part, Paul Nolte described how the state could address some of the problems highlighted in the second part.

While the lecture was generally good, the discussion with questions from the audience that followed it was much more eye-opening to me (probably also because I had already read about many of his ideas in his book). There were quite a number of people who spoke up and they were generally quite critical of his vision. A number of people even compared his visionary idea of more socially active citizens with the vision of communists who claimed that for socialism to work, a “new human” is needed. But in general (making the comparison with communism or not), people argued that his vision is unachievable. You could hear comments like: “”People are not interested in the society anymore, they just care about themselves and you can’t change that” or “the majority of people wants to be led and for those who lead, we have our politicians” - which is a comment that totally ignores individual leadership and is in my opinion exactly what Germany is lacking!

Over the last years, it has become more and more embarrassing to talk about one owns individual engagement. Doing social work is not really something that is openly valued and appreciated – people are not grateful to others to do this kind of work (and this is exactly one of the things that Paul Nolte mentioned in his speech as well) and instead of those of us who are active telling others that they should do the same and show more solidarity with their fellows, we are hiding ourselves and our activities when talking with other people about them (in my case, I know that telling many people at university about the things I do, I would just hear from them things like “why don’t you go out and party more?”). In addition, I strongly believe that we need more leadership in all spheres of live. This is an area where we can learn a lot from America – promoting leadership skills, valuing them and awarding leaders for the benefits they bring to our society. All this is non-existent in Germany.

I actually very much liked one of the responses that Paul Nolte gave to a statement that we can’t change a thing anyway. He said: “Only because a disease is hard to combat, doesn’t mean that we don’t try curing it”. But adults are so … disillusioned, vision-less, exhausted from life or as Kumi Naidoo’s son apparently once phrased it “contaminated with experience”. Renée, the Coordinator of the Millennium Campaign in Germany, who spoke at the event of the European Youth Forum, which I attended this weekend, said in response to the question, why she chose to focus in her Campaign on young people: “If I speak to adults about the MDGs, they might agree that they are very important, but they are very skeptical if they can actually be achieved. If I speak to young people about the MDGs, they say: Ok, let’s do it and make them become a reality!” It was exactly these words that I had to remember yesterday evening when I heard all these old people speak. And maybe the reference to communism isn’t something that we should just laugh about. Maybe there lies a deeper truth in it. If you look at people in Germany who “don’t want to leave everything as it is”, then you’ll find out that (still) a majority of them are “Alt-68er” (those who were part of the big student demonstrations in 1968). Many of them were communists, but after the fall of the Berlin wall, all that they believed in over many, many years suddenly fell apart. They had to realize that their vision was unrealistic – and they became disillusioned by that.

But if the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism disillusioned so many – then this is yet another reason for me to turn the power to young people, whose minds are still “uncontaminated” and who still believe that, if you just work hard enough, then it is possible to make a vision come true! Giving up before the work has even started is a virus that unfortunately, too many people have already been infected of.

On Friday, something really weird happened to me, something, which still doesn’t make any sense to me. But let me tell you:

A few weeks ago I was invited by the European Youth Forum (YFJ) to attend their “MDG information and training day” in Bonn (the former capital of Germany) as a resource person on the MDGs. I was first supposed to just co-present on the topic “Youth and the MDGs” with Leif Holmberg, bureau member of the YFJ, but in the last week before the event I was asked if I could give two more presentations, one about the MDGs more broadly (I called it “The Millennium Development Goals – Opportunities and Challenges”) and one about advocacy for the MDGs (“Advocating for the MDGs – the birth of a new global movement”). As A friend of mine was visiting me last week for a couple of days, I had no time to prepare any of the presentations though, so I ended up working on them during my train ride to Bonn.

I spent about 1 hour on my part of the MDG and Youth presentation when it was almost done – I just wanted to add a few screenshots to it. But for some strange reason Powerpoint didn’t want to add them. So I saved the document and restarted Powerpoint – nothing. Then I restarted my whole computer. But after that, I suddenly couldn’t open the document anymore. Instead the program gave me the error message “this file can’t be open as it is either corrupted, in use or the program doesn’t support this kind of file” (something along these lines). It was very strange, but whatever I tried, it didn’t work, so before loosing even more time, I reconstructed the whole presentation :- (

When I arrived in Bonn, I had a meeting with the organizers and we then went to have dinner. After dinner, the event was opened with “ice-breakers” (some of them were actually really funny games – I had great fun!). However, it wasn’t until 11pm that I could eventually sit down with Leif to finish the presentation and finalize also my two other ones. At 1:30am we were finally ready though and Leif went to his room. And now it happened, what I still have no explanation for: After Leif had left, I saved all the files (I’m 100% sure I did), left my laptop on the bed and went to the bathroom. When I returned, the file with my presentation had strangely disappeared!!! I was utterly confused as you can imagine – how can a file just disappear? But the place where I had saved it on my desktop was suddenly empty – there was nothing than a big hole. I started searching on my whole laptop for the file (luckily I have a Mac with Tiger, which makes searching for files thanks to Spotlight so much easier), but the only file that I could find gave me the same error message than the one I created in the train that afternoon – and I’m not even sure that it was that file (I also searched for auto recovery files etc, but to no avail).

Luckily, when I was just looking for the file, Leif called again to ask when he should wake me up (my presentation was at 9 am and he knew that I have a hard time getting up so early in the morning ;- ) I told him what happened and he said he would come down to my room immediately. But even with his help, we couldn’t find the file again and the corrupted file didn’t want to open on his laptop either. In my desperation, I even tried calling Mike in Toronto, who had helped me many times before with computer troubles and who I knew can do magic when it comes to technology. And in fact, after sending him the file, he was able to retrieve the information, but he told me that the file only contained two slides – how weird!

So basically, there was nothing I could do. The only file that we found on my laptop was corrupted and contained only two slides (another reason why it probably wasn’t the right file: it said that it had last been changed around 12 pm), while the real file had completely disappeared!! I’m still trying to come up with a logical solution that would make sense to me, but so far it is still a total mystery to me.

The presentation went nevertheless very well though. I went to bed at around 2:30 am that night (although I was so confused that I couldn’t sleep until 3:30 am), but thanks to Leif’s help I was able to reconstruct the whole presentation the next morning.

It was very crazy though; I got up at 7 am, started my first presentation at 9 am, presented – with breaks - until lunch at 1 pm and then after lunch co-moderated a policy discussion on aid and debt. When I stood up from my chair after this policy discussion meeting and spilled my whole bottle of water on the carpet I knew – it’s time for me to sleep!!

It’s still surprising though how you can even with just a few hours of sleep be fully present if you have to. It all depends on your mind – I had to be fit to present, so I was able to do it. But after my responsibilities were over, I collapsed immediately.

Anyway, I wanted to share this little story about my presentation with you – maybe some of you had similar experiences already? Although, I doubt that disappearing files are a very common phenomenon…

This morning I read a very interesting interview with Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss born Muslim and one of the leading intellectuals about the Islam. When they came to talk about the freedom of press in European countries, Ramadan said that many Muslims in the Middle East think that the governments are responsible for the caricatures printed in the press, because in their countries the president controls the press. When asked by the newspaper, if he also thinks that many people might not be aware of the fact that there is even in European countries a huge debate about the caricatures, he said that he thinks so, but added one important thing: He said, that we in Europe are not much better in this respect as we see the people in the streets of Islamic countries, who smash the windows of European embassies and demonstrate against “the West”, as the Muslims.

We don’t differentiate either. And I must admit that he is certainly right. One reason for that is the one-sided press in our countries (which is in fact something that Tariq Ramadan mentions in the interview as well). It’s the same as with young people in the press: The bad and ugly is portrayed all day, but nobody talks about those who can be seen as role models - or even just normal people (cause I don’t believe that every Muslim is supporting the violence these days as much as I don’t believe in the common view that young people are supposedly not interested in anything societal and rather watch TV or play video games the whole day than contributing to their communities).

For that reason, I started searching for literature that is presenting me with another view – I’m fed up with the daily bad news that I have to read when opening the newspaper in the morning (or rather looking up the headlines on the Internet). So far I have found two books that I really liked and that gave me a new view on people in countries you usually only hear bad things about. One book was a biography of Wangari Maathai. A very short and simple description of her life, how she grew up, why she started the Green Belt Movement and how she became active in the political arena. The reason why I liked the book was because it was presenting me with a fascinating and courageous African woman who dared fighting against her corrupt government even though that meant that she was constantly risking her life. These are the stories we need to hear! I’m sure there are many more people like Wangari Maathai on this vast continent – journalists, where are you? Find these people and tell us about them!

The second book that I read in December already is a book called: “We are Iran: The Persian Blogs” (the German subtitle is even more interesting: Rebellion against the Mullahs – the young Persian Weblog-scene). The book basically consists of hundreds of quotes, taken from weblogs of young Persians who similarly to Wangari Maathai risk punishment for publishing their opinion on the Internet. Nasrin Alavi uses these blogs to present the reader with a completely different picture of Iran: Young women who write about love, friendship and their admiration for Shirin Ebadi (another one of these great people we should hear more about!); young people who are fed up with the politics of the ayatollahs in Iran and who clearly say: “our enemy is not the US, our enemy is our own government!” and students who fight for human rights and the freedom of press.

While western newspapers only report about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s newest speeches in which he either denials that the Holocaust ever took place or offends western governments in some other way, this book allows us a glimpse behind the curtain of hateful speeches and gives us an understanding of the struggle and endeavors of ordinary young people in Iran.

Let me cite a book review that I found on amazon.com:

Any who would understand the people and culture of Iran must read We Are Iran: The Personal Blogs: it gathers the country’s Internet diaries and translates them from Farsi to provide quite a different view of the ordinary people’s sentiments and experiences. Much of what comes to the U.S. in newspapers comes from reporters or politicians: We Are Iran comes from the people - in particular, from an educated, youthful, literate segment of the country which doesn’t condone Islamic fundamentalism and which is eager to embrace a new era. Supplementing these blogs is commentary on these people and their concerns, providing the background and cultural insight necessary to appreciate the voices and their place in modern Iranian society.

Of course, there hasn’t only been positive critique for the book. As one critique points out: “The vast majority of Iranians do not have access to the web. As in most countries, Iranian bloggers represent the views of a very limited demographic group - affluent and otherwise privileged individuals.” When reading the book, we have to remember this. But I’m nevertheless extremely happy to have found this book. I wish, more people who are quoted in the book were given the chance to appear in western newspapers and magazines – I’m sure it would help a great deal for a better understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims. To end with the words of Tariq Ramadan:

“If it should come to a clash of the cultures, both sides will lose. If it comes instead to a dialogue of the cultures, then both sides will profit. We must understand that whether we win or lose, we will do it together.”

Stuck in the middle of nowhere.
This place is not my place anymore.
Rain is covering the soil I’m walking on,
Like tears sympathizing with me.

I’m longing to be embraced again
By this city;
As much as I’m longing to be kissed
By the person I love.

Loneliness is creeping into my soul.
The night is my only friend.
Darkness is surrounding me,
Like a warm shell covering my skin.

I’m longing to be embraced again
By this city:
As much as I’m longing to be kissed
By the person I love.

At night, this place has its right to sleep.
At day, I’m tired of its pace.
Slow and constant are its moves,
But no change will ever be borne here.

I’m longing to be embraced again
By this city;
As much as I’m longing to be kissed
By the person I love.

I need to leave and I know where to go.
Darkness is light, and light is darkness.
The city that never sleeps,
Is my place to be.

New York,
I’m longing to be embraced by you.
How long still do I have to wait to make you mine?
How long still before I can sleep again?

[It must be at least 8-9 years since I last wrote a poem or any piece of lyric…. Kudos to Coldplay for the inspiration while writing and for the first line that I allowed myself to copy.]

Usually a year ends with reflections. But for me, it seems as if I postponed this moment of the year to the beginning of the new one. Over the last days, I’ve started reflecting about a lot of things (and I say I started as I have the feeling that this phase will still last some time). I’ve reflected about personal things - such as myself, what I want to achieve in 2006, about love and friendship - but also about “external” things, such as “the world in general”, TakingITGlobal, youth participation and youth structures in Germany…

This weekend I attended a seminar organized by the Servicestelle Jugendbeteiligung to give input to the NAP-Report, a paper, which provides the German government with feedback to the German National Action Plan for a World suitable for Children (Nationaler Aktionsplan für ein kindergerechtes Deutschland 2005 – 2010). We were about 20 selected young people from all over Germany, divided in three groups to give input to the chapters “youth participation”, “living standard” and “international responsibilities” (another seminar will deal with the other three topics of the NAP next weekend, these are “equal opportunities through education”, “growing up without violence” and “promoting a healthy life and environment”). Due to my background in international youth work and especially my knowledge about the MDGs, I was invited to participate in the third group about international responsibilities. We were a great team of young people between 16 and 24 and I’m generally very satisfied with the recommendations we came up with. One thing I’m especially happy about is that the group decided to recommend our government to support and promote the MDG and Youth Report. But even though I enjoyed the policy work, the weekend made me realize again that I’m slowly getting old and soon won’t be “youth” anymore. I also felt strange at some times given the vast experience I was able to gain over the past years and I strongly believe that I shouldn’t participate in such meetings anymore, rather should I support younger people to get involved (for a similar experience check my blog about the World Youth Congress 2005). I also realized that I’m getting old when I returned home yesterday evening: Two nights with barely five hours of sleep, alcohol in the evenings and full working days – I seriously can’t do this anymore… ;- )

Beyond these personal reflections, there are, however, also a few things that are more general and which I would like to share here:

First of all, I must say that I’m positively surprised by the fact that the German government initiated (and funded) this process, which gave young people the opportunity to give feedback to the report and provide concrete recommendations of how to expand or concretize it (the recommendations we developed this weekend will be handed over to our Minister of Youth in March and will then be discussed within the government). Looking back at the past 3-4 years, this has almost become a standard procedure in Germany, but more generally in Europe I think. For example, in 2002 I attended a German youth conference (organized by the same Ministry) to give input to the European Commission’s White Paper on Youth. Also, at the end of 2004, young people from all over Europe were invited to give input to the European Youth Pact. More and more, giving young people the chance to provide input to policies that are directly made for them, is becoming a standard procedure in Europe.
Given this fact, one of the recommendations we developed in our group this weekend, and which I strongly believe in, is that the German government should play a leading role in guiding developing countries in the same direction. Showing developing countries, how youth policy is made in Europe and providing them guidance in how they can work towards setting up similar procedures is something that Germany should see as a responsibility towards children and young people in other countries.

Beside the official seminar, I had the chance to discuss, brainstorm and plan with a few other TIG members and youth activists from Germany the future of TIG in Germany and “the good, bad and ugly” about German youth structures. It is amazing for me to meet people like Hodg or Marc, who are so full of enthusiasm for TIG and want to support us in getting TIG more widely known and used among young people in Germany. At the same time, though, there were quite a few people who had visited TIG before and were simply overwhelmed with the vast opportunities the site offers – so overwhelmed that they never came back. While I’m happy that we are meanwhile a small, but enthusiastic group, which is interested in translating TIG into German, I must say that there are limits to promoting TIG in Germany if this problem is not being dealt with.
While TIG is growing in other regions, Western Europe has a well-established culture of youth participation and it is much more difficult to convince young people here about the value of TIG. I also think that Western Europe is much more inward-looking than most developing countries. While European young people repeatedly say that they are interested in the world and care about the well-being of people in other countries, most youth organizations are still dealing with local or regional problems – and not so much with international ones. This is of course an opportunity as much as a problem for TIG.

It will be very interested for me to see into which direction German youth structures will be heading in the coming years. A growing resistance among newly set up youth organizations (but also government structures I imagine) in Germany towards the National Youth Council, which is not able to react in any way flexible, the growing need (at least in my view) to focus on international work and the growing interest of the Ministry of Youth to involve young people in policy making – all these challenges will have to change the existing youth structures in some way sooner or later. Let’s see when and how these changes will happen :- )

A few days ago I finished reading (the German translation of) the book “The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness” by Nigerian Nobel Prize Laureate Wole Soyinka. It is not an easy book to read. The texts are lectures that Soyinka gave at Harvard University in 1997. But I managed to last through the whole book, probably in hope for more lines about this one thought that Soyinka already describes very early in the book… The questions he raises all focus around the three words: truth – reconciliation – reparation.

Throughout the book Soyinka refers to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and sometimes to the similar institution in Nigeria, which has dealt with the atrocities of former dictatorships such as the one of Sani Abaja. In these commissions, truth is perceived as the road to reconciliation: If only the perpetrators admit their atrocities and speak out the truth, reconciliation is possible and in most cases accepted by the victims. But what role does reparation play, asks Soyinka? He questions, weather reconciliation can take place without reparation and he refers to the Holocaust as one example – reconciliation without reparation would have been impossible to imagine in case of the Holocaust.

The point that he wants to make in the book is that reparations should be paid for the slavery system during colonialism and I think this is an interesting point. Interesting not in the sense that I say: Yes, that’s what Africa needs. Rather interesting in the sense that it makes me think.
I’ve been reading a few customer reviews on Amazon about the book and in fact, most people there (although, all Americans) are arguing against any form of reparation. Let me quote a few lines to discuss what I find interesting about the idea:

“[…] though we lament the truly horrific thing that was done to black Africans, their enslavement, and though we must never forget the truth that, for all it’s humanistic rhetoric and ideals, our Western Civilization perpetrated this evil, we must also recognize that it was Western Civilization which was responsible for ending the horror. We must recognize that the generations which committed these acts should not be judged by our modern standards and that, in any case, they are long gone.”

“[…] the more important question for Black Africa and for it’s intellectual leaders like Mr. Soyinka is: Does this obsessive focus on the past help to create a brighter future for Africa? Although it is a truism, the future is not about the past. In making the case for monetary damages, the author alludes to Holocaust survivors and their quest for reparations and for restoration of lost bank accounts. There’s no need to rehash the issue of actual victims and actual wrongdoers, the more significant fact that he’s missed is that European Jews did not sit around waiting for these damages to be paid. They seized the moment, fled to better lives in America and established their own nation in Israel. They moved forward and are a stronger, better people for it.”

There is one thing I agree with: No doubt, Africa shouldn’t be looking back – it should be looking forward, because this is the only possible way out. However, I wonder about one’s ability to simply forget the past. The person I just quoted is saying that European Jews didn’t just sit around waiting for the damages to be paid. It is true that they didn’t, but nevertheless: would Jews today really be as strong, if the world, and Germany in particular, would have just offered the truth for reconciliation? Weren’t the reparations paid to European Jews an essential part of the reconciliation process? I believe it’s not even a question only to be asked the victims. As a German, I would still feel a tremendous guilt for my grandparent’s generation if Germany had never apologized in such a way for its past as it did (I still feel guilty btw, but to a much lesser extent – I guess, this is part of my German identity). In the same sense, I would feel guilty and ashamed as a Japanese in front of any Chinese person as Japan missed to apologize in the same way for its atrocities in China during WWII.

Africa, however, never had the chance for such reparation and even the awareness within the colonizing countries seems to be missing. Maybe it is just due to my general bad memory when it comes to history, but was there ever a time when Europe was reflecting about colonization? I just remember taking a course about migrants at university about two years ago. During this course, we did a city tour “on the footsteps of migrants in Hamburg”. One stop during this tour was the Africa House – a trading center from which once Germany decided much of its politics in its colonies in Africa. Amazing for all of us during the tour – the same company which was leading the center 100 years ago, is still having its headquarter in the house today. Accustomed to reparations that were paid to Jews, we were all shocked that nobody ever questioned the integrity of this company and that no reparations were ever asked for.

Another quote:

“The course that Mr. Soyinka counsels, backward looking, grudge nursing, scab picking, entitlement claiming, as it is, must surely be a recipe for continued stagnation and even decline in Africa. The cold hard truth is that the West will send aid to Africa, not for reasons of guilt or of obligation or of cosmic moral justice, but for that most basic, most Western, of all reasons: because Africans represent a huge underutilized customer base for Western business. It is the height of folly for the best minds of Africa to waste their time on such a notion as Western reparations to Africa. It’s over. You have your freedom. You run your own countries. Your destiny is once again in your own hands. Enough of looking without for the answers to your problems; look within; to do otherwise is to remain dependent on the West.”

Looking within. A lot of problems that African countries face today are remains from the colonial time. Of course we can say: but nevertheless does the continent have to live with it now and move ahead. “Yes – but”, I would respond:

Last summer, my ex-boyfriend broke up with me in a very ugly way. I was hurt for several months, I couldn’t think clearly let alone look ahead into the future. It was only until the day I forced him to meet with me and talk to me, tell me the reasons (that he didn’t have) for breaking up with me. Soyinka is right when he says that victims need to know the truth at least. It is only after a victim has faced its tormentor that it will be able to move on with its life. But Africa never even had this chance of facing its tormentor.

I don’t know if this all makes any sense. It’s a huge topic and would probably fill a whole evening to discuss. It’s also a very philosophical topic and actually goes way beyond the question about reparation pays to Africa. To me, and that’s why I lasted through the whole book, the general question about the relationship between justice on the one hand and truth, reconciliation and reparation on the other hand, is just a really interesting one. As I just said, I had to remember my own personal situation last year and there are surely several other situations in my life when I wanted to know the truth, if not even a “reparation” or compensation for what I experienced. Sometimes such compensation is more important for us than we want to admit.

Over the last couple of weeks I spent quite a bit of time thinking about a possible topic for my master thesis, which I’ll have to start in spring next year. Attending the events around the 10-year review of the World Program of Action for Youth in New York played a crucial role in determining which area I wanted to concentrate on: youth employment. Whoever I spoke to in New York – people from UNFPA, ILO or the World Bank – everyone told me, that they want to support youth programs and activities, but that they are simply missing the data, which would show why it is so important and how it could be done. So I thought, why don’t I devote my master thesis to doing such research if nobody else is doing it? I really don’t want to spend (at least) 6 months of my life, researching and writing a 100-page paper that will end up on my professor’s desk – or even worse in his trash bin. Given my interests (youth, MDGs…) youth employment also seemed to be an excellent combination of my studies and personal interests.

For that reason, I got in touch with someone from the Youth Employment Network I met in New York and discussed the possibility of working on a topic (in the field of youth employment) that would be useful for the network – and eventually would help build the case for young people themselves. The response I got so far from YEN is very positive and after a conversation with a consultant for the ILO, who is currently doing a big study on barriers and incentives to youth entrepreneurship, I was full of enthusiasm to devote my thesis to the cultural aspect of this. My idea was to identify cultural barriers and incentives to youth entrepreneurship in a few selected countries.

I must admit that I hadn’t put much thought into the methodology or even the concrete theoretical framework of it when I had the chance to talk to my professor about this idea today. I would have been more prepared if I had been to one of her office hours, but as her 1-hour/week office hour (not uncommon for German professors, some even offer only 2 hours/month) is usually booked well in advance, I just had to take the chance that I was the only person today, who showed up to a research colloquium she is holding… So I presented her my rough idea, but she was not at all impressed by it.

In her opinion, what I was planning to do was a dissertation, not a master thesis. She told me that the only purpose of the master thesis is “to show that you are able to work scientifically”. She also recommended me, not to conduct any interviews or in any form whatsoever collect data myself. Instead, I should devote myself to studying a theoretical approach within sociology and keep this topic for a possible dissertation later on.

Of course I wasn’t at all happy about her response. Not even so much about her arguments why it wouldn’t work (I actually thought she was right), but more about her attitude and the way she treated me. I was completely devastated and de-motivated after talking to her. It was such a typical scenario for me and proofed all my prejudices I have towards German professors: They simply don’t care at all about their students. First of all, she didn’t seem willing to help me at all. All she said was negative: this isn’t good, that isn’t good. But she wasn’t giving me any advice. What I would want from my professor is that he is like a mentor for me, that he gives me advice and helps out where I’m stuck. I was hoping my professor would help me with literature or the methodology by saying things like: why don’t you read this article here, and to make it more tangible you could change your question in this or that way, and why don’t you consider this or that methodology etc. Instead I had to keep asking her for every little piece I wanted to know and even then her answers were very brief (e.g. I asked what cultural theories I should look at and she told me about one single article). It’s not that I expect her to give me answers to everything, but she could at least lead me into the right direction.

But moreover, she had not a single positive word for my idea and the fact that I wanted to do something useful with my master thesis instead of writing a paper that nobody is interested in. On the contrary, I even had the feeling that she didn’t want me to be so “ab-normal”. This fits very well with a comment I received from a good friend of mine just recently who also spent quite a bit of time abroad and wrote to me about German universities (I translate): What really annoys me about German universities is the fact, that its only about fulfilling norms. Uniqueness and individuality are not being recognized at all and even less so rewarded (and he adds that this is the reason why we feel so free abroad, even in countries such as China – where we both studied together).

It’s quite frustrating to know that you only have so little support from the people who are called your “educators”. But I’m glad to have friends and other people I can turn to and who help me out. In fact, I just had a long conversation with a good friend of mine, and without giving me answers, everything became so much clearer to me. It’s just simple things – like knowing how to go about a research paper like a thesis or how to find the right literature – but exactly this is what they are not teaching you at German universities. So sad.

P.S.: Talking about (cultural) barriers to youth entrepreneurship… no wonder with such wanted uniformity at German universities that entrepreneurship isn’t very popular in this country.

Too Marvelous for Words
Staring: A. Fielding and J. McGrath
Supporting actors: U. Nwosu, T. Dawkins, T. Akinsamni,
Produced by: F. Seel
Technical assistance: J. McGrath

I promised myself and Alberto (coordinator of the WSIS Youth Caucus communications group) to write a daily blog from Tunis, but after returning to Germany, I had to realize that I stopped reporting from WSIS on Wednesday. It is now hard for me to look back and recapture what happened, but I also don’t think that anyone, who didn’t have the chance to attend the Summit itself, is still interested in this. Instead I would like to use this blog to look back and reflect more broadly on what WSIS meant to me and TIG and so many other people.

I first joined the WSIS Youth Caucus during PrepCom 2 in Geneva, February 2003. I was volunteering for YOIS at that time and went to Geneva for a few days with a small team from Hamburg. We had a couple of projects running at YOIS that were connected to WSIS and later on became what was called the German National Information Society Youth Campaign. Looking back at the beginning of 2003, however, I first and foremost remember endless sessions with Maike, going through the draft outcome documents and making amendments with a focus on sustainable development. It was that work which taught me the structures of UN policy documents and how important a comma or slightly different phrase could be.

It is generally interesting to look back and see how much of the work of the Youth Caucus was focused on policy in Phase I, whereas it almost didn’t play a role at all anymore in Phase II. I would just like to mention the ups and downs at the Intersessional meeting in Paris, when the youth paragraph was garbled and only through the help of Abel from Fiji became the strong paragraph again that was adopted in December 2003.

The Youth Caucus was also my first real acquaintance with TakingITGlobal (I knew the organization since summer 2001, but never met any of its staff members). I met Nick and later on at the Summit itself also Jennifer and Mike, although I barely remember speaking a word to either of them – a strange thought as they are both dear friends of mine today.
Asking Nick for an internship opportunity in North America was how I ended up living in Toronto and working for TIG for 10 months. His response in early 2004 was: Why don’t you come to Toronto and work for TakingITGlobal? Yeah why not was my thought and so I went almost a year later, not knowing what I would be doing, how long I would stay and even with some doubts if I’m welcome by Mike and Jen.

WSIS has thus always been strangely connected to my personal life in a very intensive way. And no doubt that many other members of the Youth Caucus can say the same: Nick, Alex, Maja, Titi, Thomas – just to name a few. For all of us (I assume), WSIS has never been just a conference but so much more.
And even for TakingITGlobal itself: looking back three years, of course TIG was still very young at that time, but would it be today what it is without WSIS? I don’t think so.

But now that it is all over, the question is: what comes next? Where to go from here? You could here quite a few voices at WSIS asking for the recreation of YCDO and even more now than ever before, we need to take action and make reality what we promised the world we could do!
One of the greatest memories that I’ll keep from Tunisia are the moments I spent talking to ‘Gbenga about the youth initiatives in Nigeria. These are the initiatives we need, carried out with passion and the conviction that young people can make a change.

And of course there is the personal level as well. It will be quite a bit of a challenge to keep in touch over such great distances, but as we are all global citizens, I’m full of hope that one day I’ll see every single member of the Youth Caucus again somewhere.

P.S.: I’ve uploaded a few pictures from the Summit to my Flickr gallery – Enjoy!

It’s 7pm and I would have no problem falling asleep right here right now (I’m still in the youth hub). I went to bed yesterday night at 2am after “interviewing” ‘Gbenga Sesan from Nigeria about their National Information Society Campaign as preparation for a speech that I was giving today on behalf of the Youth Caucus.

But let me start in the early morning… It was the first day of the actual Summit and for some strange reason, there was only one bus going to Le Kram (the exhibition center) – at 7:30am! Too early for me, so Eman, Sofya, Jarra and I decided to take a cap together at 8:30am as we all had to be at the National Information Society panel, which started at 9am. What we didn’t expect was to find a huge line-up in front of the exhibition center. It took us 1,5 hours to get in!! But we still made it for the end of the panel and I was able to take a few pictures (as Titi and Robert had asked me to). After that I went to the Youth Hub, where I gave an interview to BBC about youth in the Information Society. I think the interview went well, although I found it a little strange that the woman was asking me mainly questions focused on the digital divide from the perspective of youth from developing countries. For example she asked what the most frustrating thing is for young people from developing countries in terms of the Internet. But how shall I know? I can guess certain things, based especially on the experience of working with TIG’s regional youth editors who have continuously trouble with their Internet speed. But at some point I really thought: Why is she asking me this and not a person from a developing country who knows the situation better? Oh well, lets see how the final story will actually look like…

After the interview, I had a coffee and prepared my speech for the afternoon. CONGO (Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations in consultative relationship with the United Nations) had invited one speaker from the Youth Caucus to speak on National Level Best Practices from Civil Society in bridging the digital divide, and the Youth Caucus had chosen me to speak. As I had feared it would happen, however, I just received the confirmation yesterday and had no clue what I would be saying. So I ended up preparing my speech one hour before the event started…

The event was quite interesting though. In the session before mine about grassroots best practices, Geeta Malhotra from OneWorld South Asia was focusing her speech a lot about involving youth and especially getting educated young people to go into rural areas and train other young people there – exactly what the Youth Caucus did in some countries as part of their National Campaigns!

My panel actually had two high-level people on it: Nitin Desai, Special Advisor to UN Secretary General for WSIS and Shashi Tharoor, United Nations Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information. I had seen Shashi Tharoor speak at the UN DPI-NGO conference and just last week read an interview with him in the magazine of the German United Nations Association and I was really looking forward to meeting him. But of course he was just giving his speech and then rushing to another event. The only thing I could do was handing him an invitation to the World Summit Youth Awards while he was leaving the panel. Pretty sad that he didn’t stay longer – it would have been so cool if he had heard my presentation, which I think went quite well (Rik from CONGO and a few other people told me at least that I did a good job and that it was great to see my enthusiasm – Marc filmed it and I’ll for sure have a look at how I did later on).

After the presentation I went to the youth hub reception and just hang out in the hub, talking to people etc. At 5:30pm me, Eman and Luke wanted to leave to the World Youth Award, which was just a few meters away in another exhibition tent. However, the security guards had decided not to let anybody into the other tent anymore. It was a crazy scene with lots and lots of people trying to convince the guards that they need to go to the other tent, while at the same time pushing them further and further back. Some of them actually came up with crazy reasons why they had to go: “My bag is over there”, “I’m working at a booth in this tent” or “I’m speaking in the plenary right now and have to go there”. I guess, the way Luke finally got us through wasn’t much better, but pretty smart nevertheless. I had Jarra’s camera with me and Luke figured out that one of the security guys was letting media people through, so he just told him that I was a photographer and had to go to the awards ceremony.

About the rest of the evening there isn’t much interesting to say. But to end with a few general thoughts: I’m starting to feel very… how to say: in a cage? All the security people and the fact that there are only men in the street (well, 90%) makes me feel very uncomfortable. In the exhibition area and especially on the way there, I feel totally under control of some external force. And when I’m downtown I’m walking through the streets and feel that there are only guys sitting in the cafes and everyone is staring at me. I don’t like this feeling. I think I would really enjoy Tunisia a lot otherwise. Everything is clean and the old parts of cities are very beautiful. Also the weather is gorgeous and people are extremely friendly (especially to women ;- )

Let’s see what the end of the week brings…