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Showing posts from June, 2009

Walls that divide, Walls that unite: personal lessons from the trip to Poland

(Picture: message on the remains of the Berlin Wall, East Gallery) On 20th April, Easter Monday, I left Romania again for an exciting new trip. Last time I wrote my impressions about Armenia and Georgia. This is my last destination from that trip: Warsaw! In the early morning, together with our friends from the Christian Democratic Movement of Georgia (CDM), I boarded the flight to Warsaw where I was to take part in the meeting organized by the "East European Bureau for Christian Democratic parties" from the former Soviet countries. This is an agreement between the Christian Democratic parties of Armenia, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Georgia, Moldovia and Ukraine. The founders of the Christian Democratic party of Russia were observers. This meeting was organized within the conference of the European People's Party. At the airport in Vienna where we had to change planes, I saw Gevorg who just arrived from Yerevan. Unfortunately he had to wait for another plane w

Georgia: The Rose of the Caucasus (part 2)

Last time I shared my first impressions of the visit to Georgia and the beauty of the country. Here is the second part of my impressions of my trip to Georgia. In addition to everything I saw and learned about Georgia, it was impressive to visit one of the regional offices of the CDM in Telavi. The leader of the office demonstrated how they try to involve the local people in the activities of the CDM. They have a lot of people involved already and have organized special actions, like a walk to a local church that was difficult to reach. This created not only a good team feeling for the leadership team of the regional branch of the party but also much goodwill for the people in the area that is difficult to reach, because although the cities are well-developed, the rural areas are still quite poor and in need of development. Toast your heritage In the evening, a special surprise was prepared: for my birthday they organized a special dinner in a very traditional place in

Georgia: The Rose of the Caucasus (part 1)

On 20th April, Easter Monday, I left Romania again for an exciting new trip, visiting Armenia, Georgia and Warsaw. In this third report I would like to tell about my trip to Georgia. The aim of that visit was to learn more about their situation, about the work of the Christian Democratic Movement and to discuss collaboration with the ECPM. Although the city was blocked for some time because of the demonstrations against President Saakashvili, and the situation in Georgia was still tense, the CDM organized an impressive program to learn more about the beautiful country of Georgia, about the party and also about their local offices. In the first evening, I had dinner with the party leader of the CDM, George Targamadze, and with the Director of International Relations, George Rukhadze, (interesting: the Georges from Georgia) in a beautiful setting, overlooking the beautiful skyline of Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. When you see the skyline, you notice two things. First, that T