13th June
The day started with small change in schedule, we added one activity from the first day that we couldn’t do then which was corruption & transparency influence in democracy & development. First we watched a video made by our UK partner at Wolverhampton about the second project meeting. After the video Hande introduced the topic on corruption with different videos and interesting facts about corruption. With one fact a question rose: does the tradition where older generation give money to church in envelopes categorizes as corruption? There were also many other intriguing questions that were discussed for hours.
As an interesting fact it revealed that nepotism is usual for every country. After handling the topics on corruption and transparency in world politics we moved on to the next activity in which some local politicians from different political parties (social democrats and PSOE) came to visit us. With them also came local media which made a little broadcast.
The politicians explained why they decided to turn into politics, why they chose the party they are in at the moment, how do they see democracy, how the government system works in Spain they also talked about what they would like to change in their current government system, what they like about it and what values do they think are most important. Laura Alvarez sees that politics should be teach in basic school or high school, she is concerned that we have forgot how to philosophy and how to discuss, argue and debate.
After that we made two groups and we continued talking and discussing with politicians in two separate groups so we could ask some more specific questions about the topics we wanted to know. After that we had a lunch at local university cafeteria. After lunch we met Angeles Gonzalez Eslava from organization called Ganemos. She was the spokesman of the organization. The aim of organization is to enhance public initiative. They want to bring democracy even more closer to civilians they want to make it even more transparent and more ethical. This platform is open for all citizens of Jerez. After that Mercedes made a brief summary of Erasmus+ K3 project called “A matter of trust” the idea of the project was how to include youngsters into the politics, what is politics and how looks a normal politicians’ day. After we were divided into groups and had to find different ways how to be more active in democracy. All in all, the day was interesting and fun and we learned new things about different topics and we came up with new ideas all connected to democracy.
