Singapore - October 5th - 16th

As some of you might know, Per (one of my co-years here @ RCNUWC) and I went down to Singapore for the purpose of UWC International Council - a huge conference, occuring once in five years. As the audience of my blog is quite diverse, I won't go too much in detail about the IC. Main points for UWC related people might be:

• new mission statement

• new college in Costa Rica (bilingual) in August 2006

• UWC-IBO initiative in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina

• commitment to establish a college in the Middle East by 2012

• increasing number of short courses at UWCs

• many proposals for new colleges - specific aims in the area (China, Tanzania,etc.)

• more diverse selection processes in terms of socio-economic background

• LINK GROUPS (yay! :-)) -> more links between the colleges in order to strengthen the movement and not to be just a "collection of international schools"

The Council was extremely busy and I am sure I forgot to mention some stuff some of you might find important... either leave a comment or excuse me ;-)
The main reason why I am creating a new post is that I would like to publish some pics from Singapore. Again, my audience is very wide... So some of you might not find it interesting to look at pictures of people.. But I guess those pictures are important for some other of my friends.. Be tolerant :-)
But I hope all of you will enjoy the Singaporean sceneries.Although the pictures here are just a tiny mini fraction of what Per and I actually took... Wanna see more? Email me, visit me, talk to me.. see me at Christmas.. ;-)
Just to quickly outline what we did.
First five days were extremely busy - conference: guest speakers, workshops, meetings, discussions, a gala dinner in Shangri La hotel.. basically day and night in the UWC spirit of moving forward and developing the movement. Something extremely interesting for me and Per. And hopefully for rest of RCN, as we are going to give a presentation on everything we saw. :-)
After that we had a chance to spend six "free" days in Singapore. We went around, spent some time with people from the UWCSEA(United World College of South East Asia) and with Shyama's family (for those of you who are not RCN-related - Shyama is my co-year from Singapore and Per stayed at her place). I stayed first seven days with a Dutch family living in Singapore. All three of their kids (18,16 and 14 years old) are day students at UWCSEA. They left for holiday and I had to swap host families. I spent the rest of my time in Singapore with a girl called Indriana – Indriana graduated from Pearson college in 2002. The UWC network works perfectly... You come somewhere and people who don't even know you are so welcoming... Incredible. And by the way, we live in the world of randoms -> Indriana is coming to Prague in December – yay! :-) So, I will get to be the host this time.

Something about the UWCSEA

It's extremely different from all the other UWCs. I had the chance to meet at least one student from every UWC and we discussed the way the different schools operate. UWCSEA turned out to be by far the most controversial. It covers primary, secondary and high school grades. Most of the students pay for their education and attend a daily programme (that means they don't live together on one campus, rate of interaction is quite low compared to our Flekke bubble). There are only 40 scholars – 20 in each IB year. They live together in a boarding house together with 90 paying students. The school's location makes it incredibly easy to just go out clubbing or shopping. No doubt that the UWCSEA do great things in the region of South East Asia and even behind, but from the discussions with people who have experienced the other UWCs, we agreed that they lack a huge part of something called “the UWC spirit” and they are very exclusive in terms of socio-economic circumstances of the students.

But in the next post... Some pictures and short comments.

Enjoy! :-)