Soldiers with fears

It felt like I left home this morning, but in fact I've been travelling a week now.

My journey started in Podgorica, where we organised a first meeting with a new group of gays - unfortunately no lesbians yet. Everybody was very excited and eager to start organising themselves. After that I gave a lecture for the local Human Rights school. People told that we (a colleague from Serbia joined me) were the first gays that they ever saw in real life. It was an interesting experience, people were very curious and eager to learn. A representative of a women NGO's expressed that the masculine and patriarchal society will need a lot of time to overcome homophobia. She spoke about the Montenegrin soldiers. We can only hope that Montenegrin soldiers overcome their phobia and behave like real soldiers whom don't deal with fears for other people.

Friday morning I had a meeting with representatives of the Ministry responsible for police, together with a representative from an international organisation responsible for security. They noted that there are no known cases of homophobia. That's not strange, becuase Montenegro doesn't opress minorities that much, according them. Also Montenegro would have very few rape cases, men would pay so much respect to women that they would not consider raping them!!

Afterwards I spent a nice weekend at the coast of Montengro. Those moments I learn so much on how it really is to live your life in secrecy, how a society not accepting you can completely shape your life towards heteronormative standards. It really hurts to see how it affects people.

Monday morning I got a lift to Tirana. My companion only spoke Serbian, Albanian and Arabic, so we had an interesting three hours. The roads between the South of Montenegro and Tirana are so beautiful. Small roads taking you through mountains, with many cows and chickens on the way. We passed Skodahr, where you'll find small open markets all along the roads, and many people on bicycles, which made me feel being at home of course. In Tirana the traffic was one big mess, at a certain point we were not driving on the road anymore but on the left side off the road, trying to pass the traffic jam. In the middle of the traffic smoke a pig was slaughtered. Later that afternoon I guy severely got beaten up by a group of people in front of my eyes, I was unable to do anything which frustrated me.

Now I arrived in Pristina. Am here for only one day. It is interesting to see groups of activists growing in all countries. At the same time I so much understand the difficult situations in which they are working. Donors trying to push them to deliver results, but at the same time the activists undertaking the work (often voluntarily) have to deal with their personal issues too. The beginning of this year a young gay guy was beaten up by straight people here in Kosovo. Due to his faced opression he became addicted to drugs (likewise many other young people in Albania and Kosovo unfortunately do). A few weeks ago he died of an overdose. Such issues affect young activists, as they stand powerless.

100

Blog number hundred was supposed to be a festive one, but I am afraid you will have to cope with my grumpy mood. I am at Belgrade airport, waiting for my connecting flight to Podgorica. The schedule of JAT doesn’t correspond with the schedule of my travel agency, and as a result I have to wait over four hours for a connection. The signs indicating that Belgrade Airport now has WLAN do not mean that you can actually access the internet. All this wouldn’t have been that bad if my morning would have started good. But this was not the case.

First I fulfilled my civil obligations by voting for our new parliament.

Then I took the tram to the other side of Amsterdam to collect money at the bank for the coming IGLYO conference. Which due many bureaucratic rules about which we were not informed was not possible!!! Crisis in Amsterdam this morning.

Sergeant Leonard Matlovich

Bad, bad computer!!

Wednesday we have elections in Netherlands. To be honest: it's such a circus that I'm barely following it. All discussions seem so far from reality to me. Today I found a leaflet from the creep above in my postbox. One of his election statements is that he will forbid women to wear headscarfs if they are civil cervants of teachers. Also he wouldn't allow new mosques and regulate old mosques. People like him and it makes me said. Actually I wish that all men whom look like this creature were forced to wear headscarfs so that we don't have to look at them.

Anyhow, in one of the most busy weeks of the year my laptop treathens me to give up... Grrrr. I know I should talk bad words about it here as it might even stop working promtly, so let's change subject.

This weekend I spend a very peaceful weekend in Brussels. I really like the city and we've been doing cultural things such as visiting a party full of bald, middle-aged, often-under-influence-of-chemicals men. Very interesting. I also saw a African soul-concert and yesterday I went to the movies. For me the ultimate preparation for the upcoming weeks of travelling.

50 year

Next year the EU celebrates its 50th anniversary. This will happen by celebrations in many different countries. The Commission has taken the initiative to design a logo, which will be different in each member states. Now, even before the party started, Member States are complaining that they have not been consulted about the logo. The French are complaining that all these different logo's fail to symbolize EU's unity. I wonder whether they prefer to have only the logo below, giving up the French one... now that would be real unity .

Amsterdam at night

It's a few weeks later. Autumn is filled with activitities, there are only a few days that I spent at home in October and November. I've been seeing many good old friends and I've been meeting great new ones lately. Have finished an project application of almost two thumbs thick for a project in Turkey early this week. This weekend was the first and the last in this period to rest a little bit.

So I visited Kees and Marianne in Groningen, together with Jeroen. Groningen is in the very north of the Netherlands, and it smells like sugar beets in the streets. Kees and Marianne are renovating the house that they bought, a project for which I have respect but would never even consider doing myself. Spending a year in dust and in between building materials is something I wouldn't be able to cope with! But fair enough: the first results of their work are great!

Yesterday I went to the museum night in Amsterdam: all museums, but also the zoo, was open at night. We saw sleeping animals and animals that barely sleep at all, which was actually quite exciting! The guide told us for instance that every year a wild male stork returns to his partner, whom lives in the zoo, to fertilize her.

This week I'm up to the Baltic states, for the general assembly of the youth forum.

And the leafs stay!

This year it takes unusually long for threes to loose their leaves. Because we had such a nice summer. Finland was already getting yellow, brown and golden colors on its threes. Also in London a few weeks ago the leaves were already falling. But now the year will pass by so quickly, with all upcoming events. I will first travel to Budapest tomorrow, where I'll have a short break before a meeting and a conference in Sofia. Hope to see green threes there!

Poverty and Social Exclusion

Tomorrow I leave for Finland, to attend the Round Table on Poverty and Social Exclusion, which is organised by the Finnish presidency. The interesting thing is that the presidency paid over thousand euro's for my ticket, to attend a meeting in which we'll talk about poverty. Anyhow, our aim is to address the link between vulnerable grous /discrimination and social exclusion, which will be a big challenge. My visit to Montenegro gave me good inspiration for this. A Montenegrin boy of 25 told me why he consciously decided to remain closeted towards his parents. Coming out would mean that he probably would be forced to leave his family home, disabling him to finish his university and thus having big consequenses for his further personal and professional development.

And it's the first time that I visit Scandinavia, I'm almost ashamed to say this!

Ramadan

Wednesday I spent a beautiful day in Ulcinj visiting a friend. The weather was beautiful and such a contradiction with the weather in Amsterdam: I got even a bit tanned during my walk along the Adriatic sea. The one-day break was of course much too short, unfortunately I had to hurry home for waiting deadlines .
As I was visiting Ulcinj during Ramadan I experienced how Muslims spent this period. My guest family didn't allow me to join the fasting, as guest I was not expected to do so. This made me feel very uncomfortable, and as a result I wasn't even hungry when my friend's mother prepared me breakfast in the morning...

Millenium

This is the Millenium bridge in Podgorica. It opened last year and the Montenegrins are really proud of it. They even use it as background for their breakfast-show on the television. It was opened together with the new tunnel to the coast of Montenegro, reducing travel time by 60%. The capital also has a new main square with fountains. Podgorica has to look like a real capital! Lesbians are still missing in this city. I have found several gays and bisexual men already, but I am really concerned about the lesbians.

Never ending

These days my to do lists simply seem to be never ending. Most likely because of my biggest handicap - I have difficulties in letting pass by opportunities. Having long to do lists and traveling a lot is not a very productive combination, thus I decided to force myself to finish as much as possible these days. During October and November I'll be traveling a lot.

Yesterday, during the Tuesday table (formerly translated as 'dish', but I know realise this is a self-invented word), we discussed conspiracy theories. Damned interesting! According to a psychologist the existence of this phenomena is closely related to paranoia (which is somewhere at crossing lines between fear and a lack of personal capacity to judge relevance).

Following his explanations I realised that paranoide is something that exists in very diversified gradations. It often has something to do with the burning need to have explanations for anything that happens. "Why did she put the coffee machine off, she knows I always drink coffee in the afternoon!" Those kind of questions annoy me tremendously - the everlasting need for reasoning - thus I am happy to know that they are part of a tiny dissorder.

Me and celebrities

Breaking barriers

I always found it awkward how small things in life can become huge barriers. When I was young it could take me weeks before calling a friend whom I hadn't spoken to for a while. When I started to live alone I could stare at the pile of dishes for days, nothing happened. Today I have to revise a grant budget, I know it can not be much work, but it feels like such a big thing to start with it. So I spent an eminent amount of time behind my laptop today, not working on the budget and doing absolute irrelevant things (such as writing a blog about barriers).

Barriers are nothing more than psychologic blockades I think. Breaking through them gives such a released feeling. And still they remain. And now I'm going to make another attempt to start with my task.

Blue lines

This week road workers painted blue lines everywhere in my window view. The fluorescend lines indicate that you can not park your car longer than two hours, unless you have a parking permission of the city council. The good thing is that we will have less 'wild parking' in our streets of people working in the city centre. The bad thing is that I really don't like to see this blinking lines when I look out of my window.

Skopje

May 2004 was the first time I visited Skopje. I remember one dark gay bar 'Why not' in the cellar of an old flat, probably a left-over from the time that Tito was in power of Yugoslavia. After that I visited Macedonia a few times, the last time spring last year.

This weekend I was in Skopje again, and until my pleasant surprise several new gay bars had opened. Van Gogh café only is a gay/lesbian bar on Sunday evenings. It had big doors which were all open, and many people were talking and drinking on the street. I first couldn't believe that such a progress had been made, so I asked Ana whether it maybe was the case that nobody really knew that Sunday evening was the 'gay evening'. She answered, "Well if I tell my mum something in the morning before I go to work, my colleagues will probably know what I told her before I arrive at work. Everybody knows what evening it is here tonight."