Bredsjö Dream

Summer 2007 would be one of those memorable summers in my life. I had a wonderful opportunity to participate in SCI Bredsjö workcamp, in Bredsjö a small village is the county of Västmanland in the central part of Sweden. I took a bus from Lund, the city where I was an exchange student, and it took nearly a day until it reached Bredsjö. I step down the local train V-Tab at the same time as the moment I saw smiles of camp leaders waiting to welcome us at the platform.

We were eight international volunteers, we had each from Thailand, Ireland, France, Finland, the Netherlands, two from Japan and one VIP member from Sweden. Our main task is to renovate the station house in order to convert it to a community house for the local people. I found this task is more interesting than I expected before coming since this house will be the place that Kulturkooperativ, a local culture group promoting theatre work, use as the headquarter to distribute the idea of art and cooperation through theatre. The job activities during weekdays are similar but different in the essence. We woke up, start our volunteer work in the morning, had our own cooked vegetarian lunch and a couple of hours work in the afternoon. We usually have our free time after the works. We usually go to swim in the lake or go for canoe. Somedays people in the village cooked special dinner for us, prepared traditional Sauna for us to experience. One of the most fun parts is all workshops the camp leaders set for us. As I mentioned that people here is very keen on theatre ( they even have their own theatre school), we had two dance workshop, a voice workshop, one drama and nature workshop and another workshop to help us know more about SCI. One day we have a thank you party for the people in the village that help us during our stay. Our friends who are professional clown actor perform for us, eventhough we don’t understand Swedish but still I can say that the performance in fascinating. In that night, we also have mini-concert and performance that we volunteers bring from home. The end of that night became a perfect combination of happiness whatever you can get.

One of the valuable experience I had here is the chance to participate in Midsummer’s Eve which is the most important special event in Scandinavia. We have a little workshop to make our own flower ring in the Swedish way. We had traditional Swedish dinner with the special Herring eaten specifically at this night. After that, we joined the traditional dance around our artificial Maypole. I can say to my friend back home now that I had witnessed the best time where people say we should be in Sweden.

During our two weeks stay, we manage to scrape and paint the color of the house to be red. Although many of us feel so glad to be a part that help pursue Bredsjö’s dream, we got a lot of inspiration back from here. I have to accept that eventhough I have been an exchange student in Sweden for one year, this is the “real” first time that I come very close to the Swedish way of life and beautiful natures. Imagine you wake up and come out of the house to have a deep breath, the nature is all around, you are doing volunteering job beside the lake which allow you to be in them after work whenever you love to. I appreciate all the efforts of all camp leaders and the hospitality of all people in the villages that gave us in order to make our time here the good one. I know new international friends from different background but love volunteering, they teach me many new things. Kulturkooperativ told me that a lot of people have dream but what matter is how you can turn those dream into reality, the people here prove themselves to me that they could. This is the theatre school and community that have life because it originated from real hearts, hearts of Bredsjö people.

I haven’t figure out before that scientifically how long can the memory last within an ordinary man, but I am sure that my time in Bredsjö will be among those that lasts in mine. Thank you all friends and every small parts of this wonderful memories. If you would like to have one like mine, why don’t come and experience yourself.