Finally came also my turn, I am Luigi, 26 years old from Genova, Italy but living since almost 3 years in Berlin, Germany. I am one of the so called “educators”. Actually we feel that this definition fits our role. It was not hard for us to planify the activities to propose our young people crew, we simply took inspiration from the topics of the real G8 agenda: society (diversity and discrimination), environment (sustainability and global warming), economy (financial crisis and globalization). Then still something which well….you’re going to see. Being an educator in this project is a major challenge; e-ducare means in latin “extract”, “bring out” and this is exactly what we try to do. We are not teaching anything and not giving any lecture. We actually provoke the young people, inviting them to ask themselves questions, not to ignore the problems of the world, which the international community must finds answers to. I would like to mainly focus on the topic we went though yesterday, because I studied economics and I am very interested and active in this field. The activity has been structured as the following: after a short introduction video, which aimed to provoke about some incoherencies of the present model of consume, we asked them to try to define what does “economy” meant for them. I was amazed to see how many deep and smart points came out from the common brainstorming. Then in the afternoon we wanted to explain them what had happened with the financial crisis, which starting June 2008 is still affecting most of the countries this year. It was a big challenge for us to find a simple and funny way to go though this theme. So we thought of letting the young people meet 5 characters, which would give them personal and different points of view of the crisis. Those characters though would answer the young people questions only if they could first go over some challenge (like singing a song, answering a quiz, solving riddles…). So Jennifer was playing as the business woman leading a company (Nave Italia Ltd) which does not receive credits anymore from banks, can not pay suppliers and does not receive payments from customer: her main characteristic was being worried. Ale was playing as the just married young man, who first obtained a mortgage but that after having lost his job could not pay back his debt: his character was showing frustration and pessimism. Then came Ragga, the investment banker, who explained how she managed to cheat on investors and make huge money, her character was showing cynism. Lorenzo was on the other hand the desperate one, crying and feeling completely lost: as investor he explained how after saving a whole life he had lost everything on share markets. Finally was my turn to play, as the “Monte Cristo State Prime-Minister”. I must admit that I had fun playing this role. Basically my character was pointing out the incoherency of having been a liberal, promoting privatization but due to the crisis having to nationalize banks, insurance companies and other businesses, by buying them with public funds (as it happened in USA, UK, Germany…). My character was then showing uncertainty and doubtfulness. This has been finally our proposal to the young people for our document: we felt we could not expect from them answers and suggestions about the world economy, as they have been sharply doing regarding the environment or other social topics. How can you pretend from the young generation an answer, when first those decision makers look like not having a clue on which direction to take? Therefore we proposed them to put in our document just questions they would like to address the G8 presidents in L’Aquila and they came up obviously with many interesting points. Will actually the G8 presidents try to answer, as not only our young people on board Nave Italia but the whole world expects? Luigi
Lorenzo - the sad investor