School's now officially opened

Very quiet atmosphere here at college Sunday afternoon. Reason? 

Our grand opening ceremony was yesterday, so we can now finally say we're a UWC school! It was day we had looked forward to for a long time, because the '11th of October' had been our first major milestone ever since we'd arrived. It was finally time for us becoming an official UWC school.

Seven years have now passed since the first work was done in creating an entirely new school. Two and half years have passed since the first construction work was done in building the foundation of the school. Now here we are, so it feels like there it's only up to us now, faculty and students, to continue to expand the school, even though it will from now on be mainly in a psychological manner, even though the school still needs to be handed some of the buildings from the construction company, because some of them still lack some finishing touches.

But even though the school now finally is considered to be 'open', we all still have a huge task in front of us. All the things that make UWC Colleges so much more than just education need to be first thought of, then constructed and put into place. And that will take time. All of the students are so keen on actually getting out in the community and making the difference that we feel is possible, but it will take time to set up the contacts and connections needed, as well as assessing security hazards. Basically, we are all settling in and getting to know our surroundings, which will probably take the next months. But we also have some big ideas of how what we can do in this area, because the opportunities seem almost endless, since we have all kinds of weather, beautiful, quite unexplored nature, as well as very different types of land ranging from the very mountainous to quite flat.

There also have some internal challenges; as we've been reminded over and over, we shape the whole atmosphere of the college, and therefore have a lot of influence in how the school will work in the next many years. Obviously, we're only staying here until the end of May 2016, but the school isn't even at full capacity until 2019. The challenges ahead of us are quite fundamental: We have to decide on a set of rules and guidelines as well as create the values that the school is built upon. I think both the students and faculty members have a pretty clear idea of how we want the school to be in two, five, or ten years time. Our question is how to achieve this. Because obviously one thing is having the goal of something, a completely different thing is to actually achieve this goal.

But slow progress is being made all the time, since we seem always to be expanding in all senses of the word. For example we had our first Action CAS-activity outside college territories today, going on a 15 km hike in the surrounding mountains. The hike was about 4 hour long and brought us about 2 kilometers above sea level, in a rare completely sunny day. Truly outstanding surroundings and nice to finally be allowed to go exploring! So progress is being made all the time, with us slowly starting to figure out how we can get things done. Two photos are attached from our hike earlier today.

Until next time, see you!

1st month in Dilijan!

I just randomly checked our common blog of the page, and saw that Victoria and I hadn't written any blog updates yet. That is now due to change!

I have been here now a month and a day. A very turbulent month with many exciting events. Let me start with most importantly, the official opening of UWC Dilijan is in less than three weeks time! According to our principal, Johnny, there will be none less than a thousand visitors to the school on that day, including all the founders of the school as well as both the Serbian and the Armenian President. We've been told the school will be completely finished by that time, but I think we wanna see that before we'll believe it. There has though been a lot of expansions to the school in this month:

When we all first arrived on the 18th of August, there was only a small dorm building ready for us with small rooms. We had all meals in plastic boxes, because the kitchens were still under construction. We couldn't walk around college, because it was still one big construction site. We could only do laundry by hand, because the washing machines were still on there way.

I have also married an Australian girl.

Then as the first thing, the Academic Building opened its door for the first time. The kitchen of the cafeteria was ready, and instead of small plastic boxes we now have a full-fetch buffet with very delicious Armenian as well as international food. As the next thing, the third floor of our dorms open, meaning suddenly we had double the space.

Then two major changes took place. Hard to decide which one was most important...Firstly we were allowed to leave our little microcosmos to go out exploring in the neighbouring village of Dilijan as well as two Unesco World Heritage 9th century monasteries, secondly we received 5 washing machines. I'll attach a picture of my Hungarian friend doing laundry with a machine for the first time at this place - He looks quite happy ;)

About now two weeks ago our fitness centre was ready for use, and our indoor swimming pool should also be quite on the way. So now we actually only lack moving into our future rooms of four people instead of six, before this college is fully as the architect once thought of it.

We started our first school semester two weeks ago, and are now getting into the daily routine of school. Since we are the very first year of UWC Dilijan, we have started all the CAS-activities ourselves. We have now structured a CAS-schedule, and CAS starts this monday. I have a very nuanced schedule of dance, MUN, TED, french, outdoor activities, fitness, theatre in a week. At least that what my plan is to attend in a week, but I may want to cut that down, when I get more pressured on time.

That was a general introduction to the last month here in Armenia. More specific stories will come soon!

Until next time, до свидания

Carl