Go West!

Fact: I have about an hour commute to and from the school every day via train, bus, and walking. Most Danes use public transportation (along with bikes, as I'm sure you're well aware) over cars. The trains and buses are quite reliable, though this snowy weather has given them some issues. It's certainly a change from the quick-paced lifestyle of America, where we really love the convenience of cars. Indeed, though my roommates last semester were more successful with it, I failed at using the DART bus to get to campus just because the car was too easy. But I've really come to enjoy the train/bus...it's a quiet time to start/end the day, and I can get some reading in, either for class or for pleasure.

So, last Thursday, my Psychology of Happiness class of 32 students left in a bus for Western Denmark. As our leaders, we had Helle, our wonderful teacher, and we had Anders, who is the director of DIS! He said that he "didn't come as the director, but as Helle's humble servant." The other Psychology of Happiness class, which we didn't interact with until the last day, was not so lucky, and they just had a couple of DIS staff members that may or may not be involved with psychology. We left at 7:30am sharp and had about a 3 1/2 hour bus ride to the town of Esbjerg, all the way on the western shore. Here's a map of our route on the 3-day trip:


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In Esbjerg, we came to a high school/business school. It's kind of hard to define it in our terms, because "high school" for Danes can go until they're 20 or so. In any case, I suppose the majority of the school is geared toward those going into business. However, the particular group that we were visiting was part of a so-called "project" that some people had started. This project was located inside the school, but the kids only take certain classes within this project, and they don't really interact with the other students too much. It's only an 8-week program (this is important: that's a short amount of time! keep that in mind.) and it consists of two classes: one about psychology/future planning and one about physiology/health. One of the leaders of the project had been a former psychologist, while the other main leader certainly must have had some psychology experience - he at least had the knowledge of some elements of "positive psychology." While I won't go into the details of positive psychology here, that is indeed what my "Psychology of Happiness" class is about. In short, though, positive psychology is an effort to not just fix what's wrong in a person, but try to figure out how they can live "better lives." There are plenty of ethical concerns with this (such as...well, who determines what is good/happy? Is it even our place to try to find the "path to happiness?" Is this happiness the ultimate goal in life anyway? ...you get the idea ;-) ), but that wasn't really part of the discussion. Essentially, the students in the project have come from very difficult backgrounds, such as being victims of rape, domestic violence, drug abuse, bullying, or even "being told by their teachers that they aren't good for anything." The last one surprised me a lot, just because I think it's hard for us to imagine a teacher telling any student that explicitly, but apparently it happens. Also, teachers usually don't intervene in bullying, and they might even spur it on, whether intentionally or not. There's just not the same type of education and training that we have in the U.S. about that kind of stuff, apparently.

Before I go on, I will say that my description of this visit can't really do it justice at all - it was something that had to be experienced, at least the last part. Anyway, the leaders of the project gave us some info about the project in general. The goal of the project is to "strengthen the skills and self-esteem of the students," which is truly what these kids need, for they have somehow been communicated that they have no skills and/or that they aren't worth anything. It's important to note that they don't accept a student into the program unless he/she really wants to change, and they also have to have the parents' consent. When they interview someone for the project, they are given a set of 15 or so questions for them to describe themselves, such as what they hope to gain from the project and what they hope to improve on. They are also asked to describe their relationships with friends and family. Apparently, these questions were a very affecting part of what draws students into the program, because they have never been asked these types of questions - i.e., those that really cut to the heart of things. This was partly communicated by a couple of students who actually went up and pretty much gave their testimonies of how the project turned their lives around. They revealed some very personal things about their past and then stated how different they truly felt now. Certainly, this seems very much like testimonies given for people's lives being transformed by entering into a relationship with Christ, and my guess is that it's easy for us to probably be desensitized to these kind of testimonies, to some degree, but it was still quite affecting for everyone. Following that, we had almost two hours to talk in small groups with some of the students at the school. We got to know some of their backgrounds, talked about some of our ideas for how the school might be able to be improved even more, and just chatted about some funny cultural differences.

I am sure I've left much out of that scatter-brained description of the visit, but suffice to say that one of my classmates was left "speechless" after it and later said that it really turned some ideas she had about life on their proverbial heads. Take that for what you will.

After this, we traveled a short distance (as you can see on the handy dandy map up there!) to the town of Ribe, which is the oldest town in Denmark...

...and I'm going to have to leave you on a cliffhanger there, because I just realized that I have a paper due in 12 hours which I had pretty much (11:40am) that I had totally forgotten about. Oops. Luckily, it's a reflection on this study tour, so I'm already primed for that.

I will finish telling about my trip at a later time. Thanks for reading!