Thanks Fyda, and now the project is all planned!

Yesterday I had one of the best meals of my life. My friend Fyda from KSF in Sweden (read more about our trip on their web page as well) invited us to his family's house. As you can see we got one of those fantastic meals I had only seen on TV before. Fyda is the one grabbing some food on the picture. We spoke to his wonderful mum for a while and Fyda helped us translating, she has never lived in Sweden like a few others of Fyda's family. I asked her about what she thought of the freedom that the Kurds in this part of Iraq now enjoys She used to be a guerilla soldier herself, and when Fyda's oldest sister was only six months old she was sent to jail. She smiled and said that she always dreamt about living with her family in a house, and now she was doing exactly that. Her joy filled the entire room which was packed with our group and Fyda's family. And her food and hospitality was incredable.

Earlier during the day we had a last meeting with the Kurdish student group we are going to work with here Our ambitions are now outlined as follows: We will apply for funds from the Olof Palme Center; the project's name is Baba Gurgur; our main ambition is to start a Youth Center in the city of Kirkuk (students there have little to do after school/university and the need for computers, football clubs, a meeting room for study courses, etc etc is huge). In Sweden S-studenter and KSF will be the organizers (the new board of S-studenter just have to give their approval first, and also the student clubs in Stockholm). Our partner in Kirkuk will be KSF:s sister-organization there (they are the largest student organization in northern Iraq). We will visit each other a few times every year and we will prepare workshops and seminars about democracy and gender equality for the Kurdish students in Iraq. The idea is that they then will spread this knowledge in their organization in Iraq with the Youth Center as a base. I really think this can be an excellent project and I dream that I one day will be standing outside the Youth Center, seeing Kurdish students mix and discuss with other students from the region. If this ever happens, I will silently think that Olof Palme was right when he said that "Politics is nothing but will".

Now we are about to do some shopping so I have to run, don't know when I will be able to blog again since we will start heading home tomorrow. But a summary and some more pictures will show up sooner or later.