Saturday 12th March is when our adventure to Finland started. It was a long trip with a first flight to Amsterdam and a second flight that took us to Helsinki. We spent our first night in Helsinki where we visited the Centre by night and revisited it in the morning again where we took a stroll through the most important landmarks, The Orthodox cathedral, Senate square with the Lutheran cathedral, the Market square and Esplanade Park. One could not help noticing the ice in the sea around the ships. In the afternoon we got our train to Jakobstad which was the main destination of our trip at our partner school Sursik School. The trip took four hours, the landscape from our train window was of white snow and cosy houses scattered here and there. In Jakobstad we were greeted by the teachers and students who drove us to our hotel. On our first night we managed to get a very faded glimpse of the Northern Lights.
Sursik School was beautiful submerged in nature and surrounded by snow. Some obvious differences between this school and our school are that the students at this school have only four lessons a day and a good number of breaks in between. This helps them focus more as they only have four subjects per day. They rarely have homework and when they do it is more in the form of study for tests which seem to be continuous. The school is Swedish speaking as Swedish is the main language of the people living in this area. They have many hands-on subjects along with academic subjects which is a good idea, as students can have a more balanced educational experience. They promote reading a lot and even their library is built in such a way to be at the core of the school encircled with glass panels so that the library can be seen well as if to remind everyone on the importance of books and reading as the heart of education for anyone to have and become a holistic person. The school staff and students were very welcoming and for a whole week the school treated us with a warm lunch at school. The school organized a good number of activities and excursions. We visited Nanoq Arctic Museum where we saw a large collections of hunting weapons and tools from Arctic regions. The museum is a research centre on Arctic cultures. We also saw equipment from well-known research expeditions to the Arctic. We could see and walk into a peat house from Northern Greenland, a hunter’s cabin, and a goldminers camp from Lapland. We visited Faboda for an outdoor barbeque where we could see the beautiful sun set over the cold white icy sea. We also got engaged in an outdoor activity on survival techniques in icy cold climates. We participated in Winter Sports and had the chance to visit Larsmo for winter bathing in the icy water after which we walked to the beach and saw how Finnish people fish in Winter by drilling a whole in one-meter-thick ice.
During this mobility students could present the work they had worked on back in each respective country. They presented the “What If” and “What we Like and Dislike about Europe” scenarios in the school Auditorium. Students had also to work in groups on Entrepreneurship. It was interesting to see how they would plan on marketing a product of their own choice. They all conducted very good and strong presentations. A panel of judges from local industries assessed their ideas and originality and the best three groups got a reward. The last day of our mobility was dedicated to the preparation of debates. They collected arguments and decided on the individual roles for the debates in international groups. The debate was about “Societies and people can prosper and grow without harming the environment and climate”. Through these debates, through this Erasmus+ project we realize how much our students can rise to the occasion on any topic. Debating is healthy, and through it we could see that sometimes perspectives are different, and all have something valid which maybe we as adults would not have thought of. In the afternoon, it was time for us Maltese to say goodbye to our fellow friends both Finnish and Spanish. It was an emotional moment for the students. New experiences mean new friendships. We headed to the train station where we got our train to Helsinki. We flew back to Malta early the next morning.
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