Day 7

IC Day 8 (2007-08-28) (and 7 and 6 :-)

Yes, I know that I didn’t write lately (and by the way I already apologize for all the mistakes I will make in this text cause I’m not used to the Turkish keyboard) but there’s so much going on that I hardly find time for doing so (not even to sleep :-).

But let’s go back. My last entry was from the 25th of August, therefore I’ll continue with the 26th.

As I partied hard on the 25th, I just came to my room at 07h00 in the morning, waking up my worried roommate. No wonder therefore, that I didn’t manage to get up at 08h00, as I planned. I missed breakfast (what a pity), I missed the morning plenary (well that was no pity :-) and just arrived late for the Microsoft Partnership Launch session. As they closed the door to keep the latecomers outside, I decided to go to the HP Café to check my emails and then went back to the dormitories to have another hour of sleep. So they didn’t really hurt me with not letting me in but helped me catch up with some sleep :-)


The 26th was our History and / or Alumni day. Coming back to the session at 12h00 I had a very interesting session with some alumni from 1960 – 1979. Among others, Martin Bean, ex PAI and now Senior Vice President Education of Microsoft. Wow, they were really cool. Hearing how AIESEC came into existence in the UK, went on to the US and then expanded to all of South America was amazing. Just imagine a world without all of our digital devices. Imagine how they were “printing” letters that they sent to companies. Incredible. No mobile phones, no Internet. However, they managed to communicate. In the session about 1989 – 1999 there were some other great guys telling about the problems AIESEC had because of being in South Africa. As the South African apartheid regime was isolated, AIESEC faced problems because African countries wanted to close down AIESEC as it was still in South Africa. AIESEC stayed hard, explained their mission well and managed not to be closed down in African countries even though they stayed in South Africa.

It’s amazing to see how history always comes back. Right now, AIESEC faces the same problem. As it wants to expand to Israel, many countries in the Middle East region put pressure on AIESEC and threat it with being closed down in these countries. We’ll see if AIESEC manages such a situation another time.

After a discussion round with 2 ex PAI and 1 director of a growth network of the years between 2000 and 2006, the history / alumni day closed with the Engagement and Leadership awards as well with the Alumni Engagement awards.Finally, in big ceremony seven alumni became members of the alumni hall of fame.

Day 7

Day 7 had a focus on Learning Networks. First I thought it might be just a boring day but in the end … wow, I must admit I really learned something and specially: I got some good ideas out of it. I had some nice input about things that could as well be done in Innsbruck.

I was in the Learning Network track about Information and Communication Technology. Finding out that there’s a large need for interns with a technical background in the major IT companies all over the world (namely Microsoft, HP, Alcatel-Lucent etc) showed me that our idea of recruiting technical students this year in Innsbruck was a quite clever idea :-)

But the most amazing moment of the day was the big wrap up session in the evening when all the people met in the big aula and all the facilitators gave a summary of their sessions. I felt really touched when a young guest speaker, about my age, stood up, declaring that since 5 years he is HIV positive. The insight into his live, not so much being afraid of dying but being afraid of becoming lonely was incredible. Explaining that he can’t get a live insurance in the US because of his being positive and that he can’t talk about his illness, not even to his family (!!) made me understand him better. His message was that it can happen to everyone, no matter if you are well informed about it or not. Being drunk one time, he explained how he didn’t care anymore about the warnings and that HIV can live in the same house, just the next door.

Benjamin