About this Erasmus+ youth exchange in Methoni
A note from EVEC Athens. Everything from the next heading onwards was written by the young people who took part in the Erasmus+ youth exchange in Methoni, Greece, in June 2021. We publish their text in their own English and their own voice, because their words are the point of this page. We have corrected only a handful of clear typos and restored the missing spaces after punctuation where words had run together; their phrasing, their capital letters and their turns of phrase are otherwise untouched. Only the headings, this introduction and the closing section are ours.
The project was called Practice! Play! Promote! and it ran from 17 to 26 June 2021. Our earlier announcement of Practice! Play! Promote! lists the dates, the partner groups and the practical arrangements behind it.
A practical note first: this page is a record of a project that finished in June 2021, not an open call. Anything you can apply for now is listed on our Get Involved and News pages, not on this one.
A youth exchange of this kind is a short international activity in which groups of young people from different countries meet, live and work together on one shared theme through non-formal education. The wider framework for it is set out on the European Commission’s European Youth Portal, and the programme as a whole is explained on our Erasmus+ page. EVEC Athens does not decide how long such a mobility lasts: the duration follows the Erasmus+ rules for the Key Action and the grant agreement, not our own preferences.
This page belongs to our sport and healthy-lifestyle strand and to our wider work with young people. What the group left behind is all here: the hand-lettered posters in the photographs, the written messages below, and the four short videos at the end of the page.
One thing to keep in mind before you read on. The participants write about exercise, food, rest and motivation from personal experience, and parts of it are deliberately dramatic. They are not health professionals and this article is not medical advice. For guidance you can rely on, see the World Health Organization’s fact sheet on physical activity, which recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity a week for adults, or talk to a doctor.
Messages from the participants
Youngsters from Greece, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary create a youth exchange Erasmus+ project that was realized in Methoni, Greece from 17-26.06.2021. During the activities in Methoni they came up with some messages connected with sport and healthy lifestyle that want to share with all the youngsters in Europe. Here are some of them:
PROMOTION OF HEALTHY LIFESTYLE AND PHYSICAL ACTIVITY
What really means to have happy and healthy lifestyle?
To have healthy life first of all you need to have healthy mind. It all starts from the inside. If you respect and love yourself you will shine and attract people.
As you work on the inside you should at the same time work on your body. Eat healthy, exercise, drink enough water, everyone knows that. The point is to have BALANCED LIFE. If you are eating healthy for 6 days of week you can reward yourself and go grab burger and ice cream. Or if you didn’t exercise yesterday push yourself and do a little more tomorrow.
It’s yours choice to do whatever you want but improve yourself, be the best version of yourself, set the goals and then do it. Do it because you can and because you have to.
All you have is one life and why not making the most of it?
RUN HEALTHY LIFESTYLE AND REACH GOALS QUICKLY
Benefits of Physical Activity
You know you need to exercise, but there are many excuses not to do it. You’re too busy, don’t know where to start, you’re not motivated or you’re afraid you’ll injure yourself. Maybe you think exercise has to be really hard or it isn’t good enough.
It’s great if you can spend time exercising—meaning you’re sweating, working in your target heart rate zone, or doing something to strengthen your body. But it doesn’t always have to be that way. Moderate activities like chores, gardening and walking can make a difference.
Whatever definition you have about what exercise is or isn’t, the bottom line is that exercise is movement. Whether it’s walking around the block or running a marathon, that movement is exercise and every time you move more than you normally do, it counts.
Healthy Living
Our lifestyle can have a big impact on how we feel. When we don’t take care of ourselves, we can experience a number of problems, including sleep difficulties, fatigue, low energy, trouble concentrating, and increased tension and stress. These problems can leave us vulnerable to anxiety. Making healthy choices will help you feel better.
HELPFUL HINTS:
-Start small: Making small changes can have a large impact on your life. Don’t try to do everything all at once. Instead, pick 1 or 2 things and try them consistently. When you’re ready, try adding a new strategy.
-Set Goals:Identify some things you want to work on and set some realistic goals.
-Be patient:These strategies can take time to have a positive effect.Hang in there and stick with it!
A thought experiment from the group: what if you never left your bed?
What if you don’t have to leave your bed? 
Imagine a world in which you no longer need to move… at all! What would you do? Would you be able to lie on the bed all day, every day. Would you feel the urge to get up and do something? And… Would you survive your everlasting rest? 
Okay, now let’s imagine that all the work you had to do in the past is now being done by something else – maybe robots, other people… aliens. 
So you are like a boss now. You need no longer to leave your bed. A robot comes in the morning when you wake up and serves you the food that it has just cooked. It is your favorite food. 
And you hadn’t moved your little finger for it. The robot feeds you as you are the love of its life – gently, with precision and loving attention. 
Then it is time for a movie or two… or how many you want, it doesn’t matter – you have no work to do today, and tomorrow… and never. Born to relax. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Maybe you will be bored at some point but the robots are smart. 
They can see when you are bored and calculate with precision what it needs to be done. You just lie on the bed relaxing. But is it so easy relaxing? Can relaxing be… exhausting? 
Well there are some things you need to consider before you commit yourself to relaxing. First thing that starts to change, if you don’t move for more than 24 hours, is your lungs. 
Gravitation is not pulling them down into their normal position anymore, so the lower part of your lungs will crumple up. You probably won’t feel any different, but watch out, because it’s harder for mucus to pass through those collapsed passages. So it can get trapped, which can infect your lungs and ultimately lead to pneumonia. 
That’s why doctors tell people on bed rest to sit up and cough from time to time. But you are way too engrossed in the movies to remember to cough. 
Within a week your rest starts to feel even worse. Normally, your bones and muscles support your body and resist the gravity. 
Now they are out of their role. And as the saying goes – if you don’t use them, you lose them. Every week you lose about 1% of your muscle density and muscle mass. 
And then what? Your less dense bones become easier to fracture. 
Also now you have less muscle mass which means less sugar consumed by your muscles. The unused sugar can build up in your bloodstream and ultimately gift you with diabetes type 2. 
Now this is what happens only after a week or two spent ‘relaxing’. Imagine a year or two or… one whole life. 
This is why you need to move as much as you need to rest. 
And this is why, the solution to your exhausted body is not everlasting relax in bed, but a balance. 
And this is why you need to exercise, eat healthy and be educated about how to maintain such lifestyle in a way that you enjoy and not in a way that makes you feel bored, frustrated or exhausted. 
Videos from the Erasmus+ youth exchange in Methoni
The four films below belong to this project and are published on the EVEC Athens YouTube channel. They are titled Tennis promotion, Promote Yoga, Promote Volleyball and Petanque — one short film for each of four sports. They sit naturally beside the participants’ closing paragraph above, which asks you to find a way of exercising and eating that you enjoy rather than one that leaves you bored, frustrated or exhausted.
The four films are part of what the group itself produced, alongside the posters and the written messages. Two of the titles begin with the word Promote, a third is Tennis promotion and the fourth is simply Petanque; Promote is also the last word of the project’s own name. Between them they name four different sports, which is consistent with what the participants write higher up this page: that exercise is movement, and that moderate activities can make a difference too. If you watch only one, pick the sport you are most likely to try yourself.
What the Erasmus+ youth exchange in Methoni was about
Practice! Play! Promote! brought together young people from Greece, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary in Methoni from 17 to 26 June 2021. The Erasmus+ youth exchange in Methoni took sport and everyday habits as its theme, and what the group produced is what you have just read and watched: posters, written messages and four short films.
That is how non-formal education tends to work. There is no exam at the end. A group is given a theme, works out together what it wants to say about it, and then has to make something other people can actually use. The measure of it is what the group produces, not a mark on a certificate.
The English on this page is the group’s own, written by five nationalities working in a shared second language rather than by a communications team on their behalf. We have published it unchanged, spelling and capital letters included.
The photographs come from those same days in Methoni: the hand-lettered posters, the flipchart from day one, the hall where the group sat in a circle to present, and two participants buried up to their necks in the sand with METHONI spelled out in leaves between them.
Counted up, what this page preserves from those ten days is five photographs, the participants’ own writing and four short films. Only the headings, the introduction and this closing section are ours; apart from a handful of clear typos and some missing spaces after punctuation, the participants’ words stand exactly as they wrote them.
We keep pages like this one online deliberately. Reports written afterwards tend to smooth every project into the same voice. A page that still carries the participants’ own words tells you far more about what an Erasmus+ youth exchange in Methoni actually felt like from the inside.
Take part in an Erasmus+ youth exchange with EVEC Athens
Erasmus+ youth exchanges are run by organisations and informal groups that apply for a grant, and the shape of each project — including how many days the mobility lasts — is fixed by the Erasmus+ rules for the Key Action and by the grant agreement. EVEC Athens cannot lengthen or shorten a project to suit one applicant, so it is worth checking the dates of a specific call before you plan around it.
If you would like to join a project like the Erasmus+ youth exchange in Methoni, start on our Get Involved page. Open calls stay open on purpose: we leave them up until the right person applies, so a call that has been on the site for a while is still worth answering.
Not everything we run needs a plane ticket. Our online Volunteers Academy is free for everyone, including under-18s, and can be done from home. Local Volunteering covers what happens here in Athens, and our News page carries new calls and project updates.
Questions are welcome. Write to us and you will get a reply within a maximum of two working days. Our office at Polifimou 17, Zografou is open every working day from 09:00 to 16:00 if you would rather come and ask in person.
