Jamboree 2003
Imagine an old, deserted school compound somewhere in the middle of Poland. To be more accurate let's say in the middle of nowhere in Poland. It was a cold and foggy night when we arrived there with lots of other students from all over Europe to enjoy Polish hospitality for three days. The justified question you might ask at this point is: "Why the hell did you go there?" This text is all about the answer.
Each year a BEST Jamboree is organized by some country from Eastern Europe. Last year the Croatians did a good job in Zagreb, and this year the task was accomplished by four Local BEST Groups from Poland. The Jamboree is a big BEST get-together for members from all BEST groups. The idea behind it is quite simple: Offer the participants a possibility to enjoy three days of partying, information exchange, trainings, and - most importantly - meeting good friends from the spring, summer or winter courses.
We, six people from BEST Vienna, arrived with lots of others - the total number of participants was 426 - at around 9 o'clock in the evening. The check-in was well organized, but nevertheless overrun after a few minutes as they were not prepared for so many people dropping in at the same time. So, the get-together had already started at this point: I saw old friends meeting again after a long time (mostly accompanied by hugging and sometimes tears) and strangers mix up to get to know each other (mostly accompanied by some drinks).
After an hour of meeting new people we finally found our room in-between the rooms of Estonia and Greece and moved on to the official welcome in the main party room (which was the gym of the school compound).
There the main schedule was presented explaining all the entertainment and educational offers as well as the basic stuff like food and accommodation. Regarding education there were plenty of choices: trainings for everybody's taste like "effective meetings", "communication" or "team management" took place. For people more interested in gaming experiences there was an engineering competition and a business game. Finally a special training on how to organize a BEST course, involving around 150 participants, was held. Besides this there were also "just-entertainment" events like a dancing-course and group-games.
After the presentation was over, the evening ended - like the other two - in a great party. Of course in BEST a party is never "just a party" but something special. So for the first evening "Halloween" was the topic, and I met lots of sometimes strange but nice people - from Swedish Vikings to Spanish witches. BEST Vienna did its best and made extensive use of face colours transforming all of us to ugly creatures of the night.
The second night offered country presentations and the beloved international evening on which every country offers traditional food and drinks. I experienced an international evening on my summer course but this one was definitely more impressing. You have to imagine 426 people buzzing around in three rooms with delicious food and drinks from over 26 different countries. You could taste almost everything there from Belgian "mousse aux chocolat" to Romanian "Mamaliga", from Spanish wine to Russian Vodka. After about two hours everybody was stuffed with food and some who ate (or drank…) too many things in the wrong order were already on the brink of giving the food back to Mother Nature.
On the last evening a nice drinking competition was organized to soften the fact that it was the farewell party. This night when the dance floor in the gym closed at 5 a.m. most people (including me) just took the party to the rooms and had fun there until the sun went up and we had to leave the Jamboree heading back to our homes.
To sum things up I can say that everybody had great fun, enjoyed the contact with people from different European countries a lot and improved various soft-skills in the trainings. Personally I came there knowing just a few people and left having new friends in Estonia, Portugal and Croatia. So the farewell in the morning on the last day was all but sad because it really was a beginning: "See you around in Europe"
text by Marius Lessiak, photos by Alexander Rind
