Το TerraNEON στην Ισπανία κατά των διακρίσεων με βάση το φύλο

The last two weeks of July, four Greek participants and I went to an old modernist city called Terrassa in Spain, to participate on a youth exchange. The topic of this exchange was gender balance. You might say that this topic is old and out of date, but gender balance is still as important today as it was before.

Including people from the hosting organization, La Vibria, we were representing five countries in this youth exchange: Spain, Greece, Poland, Finland and Turkey.
Five countries with about 25 different backgrounds and points of view, especially about this topic.

Through various tasks, games and discussions, we tried to explore, develop and create solutions for what could be a gender balanced situation, environment or life.

One of the activities was to use toy catalogs from all the countries represented, divide them into “girls” and “boys” toys, and create a new gender balanced toy.

Another was to rearrange the gender roles in legends from our countries, performing the results in an improvised theatre.
Make up for both genders were created and we discussed and divided house tasks between the two sexes.

Each country had their own session about the situation of the gender balance in their countries.

During these sessions, the most heated discussions took place. In an exchange including Finland, who was the first country in Europe where women were able to vote, and Turkey, a country where some might say the western believes and eastern traditions still walk side by side. The different points of view about what gender balance were quite divided.

Everyone in this seminar claimed to have gender balance, based on different beliefs, traditions and ways of living.

I don't think we solved the issue of gender balance, but we helped each other to see different views of what gender balance is and could be, and to raise awareness about this topic.
We all had a great time, got to know a lot of interesting and good people, and learned a lot about the topic, each other and ourselves.