THE EVS PROJECT OF MICHELA IN CIPRO
We sent Michela to Cyprus for a group EVS, hosted by Agros Environmental Group, for the organization of the “Rose Festival”:
This is her story!
My name is Michela Spito and I am 25 years old. I have a degree in Economics and Management and I am specializing in a master in “Planning and access to European funds for culture, creativity and multimedia”. I took this path partly by fate, partly because I believe that money and the ability to guide those who produce it are essential for the sustainability of every human activity, including the most noble. I am convinced that money has no smell, as a Latin phrase states, but that through it we can give color to the world. I have the ambition of directing and exploiting its economic capacity towards projects that have an “ethical and economic” purpose – Sen would say – and through which we can pursue the objectives that the European Union claims to set for itself in the cultural sphere, given its specialization in this sector. The dichotomy between culture and economy arouses in me a strong aspiration to demonstrate the multiplying productivity of culture and pushes me to travel.
For all these reasons, and also to try to understand how a project financed by European funds works, I participated in an EVS in Cyprus where I and other volunteers – Italians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Romanians, Spaniards – collaborated with the community of Agros for the organization of the Festival of Roses. The project, though not particularly professionalizing, reminded me of the endless opportunities available to us, surrounded by passionate and intelligent people and places that need young ideas to be reborn again.
Agros is a tiny village of about 800 people, with an evidently high rate of seniority, lacking and far from most of the services that can be considered necessary today by a young person and others – cinemas, libraries, discos, theaters, transportation and so on. The structures and buildings in Agros are mostly old and decaying, marked by the gray of their years and a few blue windows. Those who want to work are forced to move, Agros does not expect many visitors even for tourism, and those who live there and seek entertainment are bound to rediscover the non-negative side of nature or indulge in boredom.
But there is something Agros has and cherishes: its damask roses and its Rose Factory. Between April and May, the roses bloom, are hand-picked early in the morning – many residents own fields of roses destined for the production of products to be sold through the Rose Factory – and taken to the Rose Factory where they are distilled and later used to produce rose water, a sweet and refreshing drink that residents use to sip, candies, cosmetics, tea and herbal teas. At the same time the village is invigorated with the attached festival, an event promoting the product and its history, and Agros is tinged with people and roses.
What I realized, not only through this experience, is that every place, as well as every person, has peculiarities and characteristics that can and should be strengthened. Exploiting the character and virtuous traits of countries and men, inserting them into a coherent network, can optimize the potential of each and all. Agros, a small and almost unknown fraction of the earth, has something to offer. For me, participating in these projects means receiving stimuli and concrete ideas on what is missing and what any place in the world has to offer, inserting what I have learned into my continuously working framework in order to be able to draw, perhaps, one day, conclusions on how countries and men should communicate.
My name is Michela and I am almost 26 years old: this is my dream, that’s my dream.