My exerience in Chevetogne
After
this last week in Chevetogne I’ve had the opportunity to think
about the significant things I’ve learned and the way they’ve
made me change my mind in relation with my working methods.
This is
the point of view of an Erasmus student, this means that things are
quite new for me, I’m still adapting myself to a new culture, new
places and new working systems.
The day
we arrived was useful to have our first contact with the surroundings
and truly believe that we were going to spend 5 days there because
that was a kind of a strange idea. Some questions came to my mind
such as “Why did they choose this place?” or “How could this
help me to develop my device better?”.
Little
by little I started to understand what this experience was providing
me in terms of learning and personal development.
Chevetogne
looked different to anything I’ve seen before, since I’m not used
to very wet, rainy and lush vegetation environments. This place has
made me see that water cannot only be a problem of shortage, but also
a problem of purity and accessibility.
Our
morning sessions allowed us to focus on our devices and test them in
a real context. One of the most important things in my opinion was
that we’ve been able to discover our classmate’s devices, ask
them to explain them, explain our own and share opinions.
Me and
my parter, Esteban, found that our device wasn’t really useful with
cloudy weather so that made us think more deeply about ways of
increasing sun-rays and therefore the efficiency. This also made us
think about the limitations of our system and the things we were able
to modify.
In the
afternoon, we explored the forest and the lakes and found a lot of
interesting things, besides, by sharing every night our experiences,
findings and conclusions made our daily work even more enriching. We
were able to learn from one another, discuss our problems about our
devices and try to find some solutions.
This
has been the first time I’ve made a travel like this, being all
together at the same house has been such an experience and has really
helped me to get to know better my classmates, which has also made me
improve my French level a bit.
I’ve
discovered the difficulties of organising big groups and put my best
skills to be helpful to the test, specially in the kitchen.
As a
conclusion, I’d say that with this atelier and
this week in Chevetogne I’ve learned that the process to develop
something is not a straight line, it’s a combination of steps
forwards and backwards. We don’t have to put so much pressure on us
if we see our project isn’t progressing the way we want, sometimes
is better to know when to stop and take a step backwards in order to
follow a good path.
I’ve
really enjoyed this week of
new experiences and to share it with my classmates and professors.
