by Ida from Dortmund, Germany

The Global Youth Faith Event 2021 was an eventful week both online and offline. In addition to the online services and workshops, meetings were helt in the Volunteershouse from Monday to Friday, where we could try out the daily activities such as sports, art and cooking together.

The GYFE was a great opportunity to get to know the volunteers personally and to learn a lot about their homeland and the first impressions of Germany, the language and the people.

I also met people there for the first time that I had previously only known from zoom meetings. And of course I was also very happy about all the well-known faces!

The atmosphere in the Volunteershouse was exuberant and warm throughout the week. It was fun to try a new recipe from a different country together every day, to have interesting conversations to which everyone brought his/her own personal point of view and cultural context, and to share hope, joy and faith with each other.

My highlight was the design of a picture on the subject of joy, because it was simply nice to be really creative again and to create something beautiful with your hands, because this just doesn’t happen often enough in stressful and technology-heavy everyday life. And it was great to see what the other people on site and internationally on the Padlet associate with the topic of joy.

During an online workshop on fair fashion, I learned many important facts about the consumption of clothing and the associated pollution and social injustice. In a small group, I was then able to learn more about the perspective of people who live in countries that are affected by clothing production in poor conditions.

These personal reports and assessments have once again made it clear to me what an inhumane system of clothing production has developed over centuries and is so bad and unmanageable today that it is difficult to improve.

The closing service once again took up all the elements that I was able to experience online and offline during the week of GYFE 2021: community & joy despite the adverse conditions of a global pandemic. It was a blessing to see so many people from many different countries singing, dancing and praying together. That’s why I hope that there will be another Global Youth Faith Event next year!