Issue 7 - Open Day – Sunday 6 August
Welcome to Global Village!
Simon Phillips, Chair, Global Village Steering Committee
This open day will bring people together from around the world – whether you are a parent or friend travelling down from London, to a solidarity delegation visiting from Western Sahara.
This camp is truly uniting everyone in an international village of friendship, co-operation, and solidarity, mixed with a healthy sense of fun. While most of us have only been here for a week, a huge amount has been achieved and the spirit of internationalism is evident – the pages of this paper speak for themselves.
We hope you get a chance to sample a bit of that atmosphere – to meet up with your friends and relatives, and to check out some of the key parts of the camp. All our centres will be open for drop-in, with full details in the rest of this newspaper. Weather permitting, there’ll be an international concert all afternoon, with many of our delegations from overseas performing. We hope you enjoy it and take a bit of the festival home with you (but leave the sunshine for us please!).
It is a delight for all the organising team to see three years of work come to fruition this past week. It seems a long time ago that the steering committee first met to agree the aims of the project and discuss the idea of 5000 people meeting together in a field in Kent.
Global Village was always meant to be more than just a camp – our educational themes kicked off last summer through our youth conference and leaders’ seminar, aimed at giving young people the media skills to get their voices heard in an ever changing world. Over the past twelve months, youth across the globe have taken peer education to a new level, running their own events to get the message of the Millennium Development Goals across, helped by the huge range of activity packs available to anyone through our website.
Events at the camp started with the fantastic opening ceremony last Saturday – a colourful, energetic and refreshingly brief introduction to the camp to welcome everyone, including a message to young people from Kofi Annan himself. The past seven days have seen young people engaged in workshops and discussions as part of the camp’s extensive educational programme about the Goals. In spite of the challenging weather, there have been over 500 workshop sessions on a wide range of topics - from simulation games about the cycle of debt and aid, to role plays about conflict resolution.
Alongside our ten theme centres, there have been a superb range of other activities. The media centre has run a nightly TV news broadcast around the site, complemented by a 24 hour radio station (87.7 fm), and this newspaper. Our innovative MEST-UP centre runs a mediation and peer education service, helping resolve conflicts on camp and providing information on a wide range of topics for young people. On top of this are the fantastic on-site Fairtrade cafés run by young people. And that’s just the day programme! The amazing evening entertainment sometimes makes this seem more like a youth music festival – but the events have been carefully chosen to fit closely with the educational programme.
All this has been achieved through the dedication of our volunteers. From the quality and quantity of work achieved, it may not be obvious to the outsider that we have only a handful of staff working behind the scenes. Only through the huge effort of the thousands of volunteers (of all ages) on site can so much be achieved – and we’d like to thank everyone for all their hard work to achieve this global community in a set of fields. From site services to food distribution, programme activities to every individual village, it is hard to imagine now that these fields were empty a mere two weeks ago.
Thanks for coming – and have a good time!