Summer University Brescia. The Good Life!

This event was exactly as the title states: everyone had a good life in Brescia! Somebody would say, “for sure you had a good life, spending a summer in Italy, how could it not have been good?”

Eighteen AEGEEans, from Spain to Azerbaijan, gathered together for ten days in Brescia, to try to find the answers; get new ideas; receive advice on how to overcome bad eating habits; think why to start playing any sport; and how to decide which one fits you the best… In other words – our goal was to write a recipe for a good life, our aim was Health4Youth (H4Y)!

By participating in the H4Y workshops, we got to know each other better, they made us work as a unique group! And everyone realized that we definitely had a lot of bad habits in common, no matter from which part of Europe we were from. The most common bad habit was eating too much candy when under stress! It is well known that most people fall for the delicious gusto of chocolate. There is a theory which says that eating chocolate is a trigger that releases a hormone of “happiness” in our body. Sure those endorphines make you ‘feel’ better.

Let us enjoy the moments of pleasure that such a sweet food (produced from the seed of the tropical Theobroma cacao tree) offers to us! And that was what this SU was all about. To change those things that in the end have a negative effect on our health. It is not easy to change a habit, it is definitely easier to replace the sort of food we eat. What we tried in this SU was to come up with creative ideas – like making a fruit salad with some nice dark chocolate dressing, eating a dried fruit etc. The concept was not to give up on chocolate completely, but just to try to combine it with some healthy food. In times, this turned out hard, because our minds are stuck in what we are used to doing.

Another example we came up with, for those who prefer salty food, was to try nuts instead of chips, especially pistachio or peanuts with shells – it takes time to remove the shells, and as the time passes by, we have less and less urge to eat. We all learned how amazingly these small things are.

But, besides bad habits, we also had one good habit in common – playing sports! We organized a great volleyball tournament and also had a nice time playing aquatic sports!

And in the end, what is the recipe for having a great Summer University? Synergy! The interaction of multiple elements (participants + organizers) in a system (AEGEE Summer University) to produce an effect different than, or greater than, the sum of their individual effects! Add a lot of Good Life to it, and you start to understand and appreciate the beauty of life in general. It was an amazing time. Period.

Written by Zlatko Djordjevic

Photos by Hekim George