Pre Departure Training

On the 26/27th July I was in Leeds for my first EVS seminar. Part of the condition of my funding is that I attend four seminars over the next year: pre departure, on arrival, mid term and on return, so off to Leeds for a night I went. We were a group of twelve, six pre departure people from the UK and six on arrival people from countries as diverse as Denmark and Portugal.

Though I was a little sceptical at first, the sessions concentrated on establishing our rights and responsibilities as EVS volunteers and gave us a chance to speak with other people about our hopes and fears for our periods abroad.

After the first session we headed out to Wetherspoons in town for an evening meal, followed by drinks at the Victoria Hotel. A few of us then went on to the FAB Bar, which has to be seen to be believed. The walls are decorated with the remnants of a forty year old sci-fi geek childhood, with Knightrider annuals and Transformer dolls, as well as a life size Stormtrooper and Dalek!

Seriously though, the training made the service seem much more real in my mind. What am I to expect when I get there? How will my German knowledge cope against both a Bavarian accent and an eighteen month old coat of rust? These are all things I suppose I'll just have to jump into.

Welcome to the Blog!

Hello!

This is my attempt to keep people up to date with what I'm doing, and to allow as many people as possible the chance to share in my peace service at Dachau. Whether you knew me at school/university or have found this by chance through interest, you are most welcome.

It has been both funny and slightly embarrassing to tell people my plans over the past year. When people ask, "So what's next after Uni?", they always look at me rather disbelievingly as I answer "Working in a concentration camp. And yourself?". It's not something I have gone into lightly. As a History graduate, I am fascinated by the practical implications of History, and in particular a means of using it to learn lessons and to better understand how a society has arrived where it has.

Germany is the first nation to have undergone a formal process of reconciliation with its past. For the first time people were held to account for their actions during conflict, and other nations saw in defeat a new opportunity for a nation to grow. There were more questions than answers (How do you put a conventional jail term on someone responsible for thousands of peoples' deaths?) but the process of Vergangenheisbewaeltigung, of coming to terms with the past, was overall a healthy one.

One initiative in the post war period was Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, or ARSP, an organisation formed by the Evangelical Church of Germany in 1958. The aim was to send young Germans to nations affected by Nazi crimes, such as the Netherlands and Yugoslavia, in order to rebuild those places destroyed years earlier. This simple act of atonement has led to over 180 volunteers in countries across Europe working in projects to learn about the practical implications of reconciliation and to work towards a non violent way of resolving past conflicts.

By working at Dachau on behalf of ARSP, I hope to become part of this movement for reconciliation. I also hope to discover how Britain can also come to terms with its past. Sixty years of decline on the world stage has left Britain with a rose tinted view of WW2 as the glory days, as well as a national obsession with the war. Just go to any football match and you'll hear theme tunes from every 1960s war film you can imagine. A national dialogue akin to that envisioned in Germany and in post Communist nations would not be a bad idea.

In the next year, perhaps I'll learn something about myself and my own ideas of reconciliation, as well as something of living in a different culture. You're most welcome to come along for the journey...