Living a Dream

The experience of participating in the exchange in the U.S. gives you not only a better sense what the life looks like in America, but also connects you with youth leaders from other European countries. The biggest takeaway from American people is their pride in their own country and core values of freedom. This has been proven once again during the celebration 4th of July, where everyone was full of joy, patriotism and happiness.

Even if Americans are different compared to Europeans, I still learn a lot about other European countries - thanks to other SUSI leaders. Their passion for sharing their experience and determination for learning as much as possible is the key for this project being so successful.

Our SUSI leaders commitment to the project was the best seen in a leadership training workshop by Kaimana Chee. He was absolutely impressed by the comments and questions he received during the workshop. Kaimana even said that he had never had such an interesting discussion about his workshop (he already delivered more than 25 of them!). The workshop itself was very compelling because we quickly went through the theory part and used it well in practice for our group projects. We have learned a lot about the SMART goals, Resources and Stakeholders, Risk Management and we even had some time to enjoy a TV show, where Kaimana showed his cooking skills and won the grand prize. The personality behind our lecturer is very unique. Kaimana has his own restaurant, works as a project management consultant, and he even has opened a school which has courses on the culture of Hawai. Oh, and by the way, he can play ukulele too, how cool is that?!

So far, it's been totally awesome, great people, interesting events and if to say this short - living a dream!