Project was supported by Youth in Action Programm and organised by Volunteers Centre Skopje between 3rd and 13th of June 2012. It gathered different, but wonderful personalities, simple tools and amaizing energy, which all together had significant impact on the local surroundings and personal development of the participants.

First of all, we tried to overcome the cultural differences, but very fast we found out, that despite the nationalities, our traditions and habits – we are all playing in the same team and have the same goal, which was making the project venue, so called ‘place to be’ in Macedonia. While working together on the promotional movie, role playing, creating posters and promotional slogans, we discovered new language that we could use – kind of slavic esperanto, even if some words in our languages had totally different meanings (e.g. fraer, frajer etc. was a cool guy in all our languages, except polish, in which it means loser).  

What was surprising for us – people from the village treated us like a special guests, helped with all our tasks, invited to their houses and tried to communicate with us, we even found one 80 years old man who spoke fluently English and revealed to us all the secrets of Brajcino. Staying in 100 years old house and participating in preparing meals brought together all of us very fast and remind that we are human beings and we do not have to use modern equipment to enjoy our lifes. At the end we felt very sorry to leave that wonderful place and come back to the reality, but we took with us the spirit of eco-tourism and eco-development, we left for the future ec-tourists renewed trails, clean river and lovely summer house.

What is more, we left beautiful memories about European youth and took the stories about people from Brajcino, about the history and tradition there to our countries. As one of the promotional slogans stated, we visited Brajcino and discover ourselves! Written by Jadwiga Mistak, coming from Polish group … ‘This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.’