Thursday 12’th of November 2009  

Travel day  

The youth’s plane from Helsinki landed on an Ivalo airport for nearly one hour late of the schedule. At 8 pm we finally started our three hours drive through dark northern Lapland with our taxi driver to our lodging place at the Karlbotten school in Nesseby that was known for haunting.  

The youth was tired after their long flight from Oulu and Tampere and Ola nearly slept through the whole drive. The others were too excited to be able to sleep and spent the time to get to know each other’s better. Arja and Tarmo from Siida museum had bought two bags of food for us and the reindeer breads and mandarins tasted well for the hungry youth and taxi driver.  

We arrived at school around 11.p. Hanne, the project worker of Várjjat sámi museum welcomes us to Nesseby and shows us our rooms. Petra and Sunna were very happy for their own private floor in upstairs with an own bathroom although it felt a bit spooky place to sleep.  After a late evening supper and introduction with the other project participants our youth left into their rooms to play with their brand new mini laptops. The laptops kept them up for a late in the night.

Friday 13’th of November 2009  

The first day of the youth conference in Várjjat sámi museum  

After staying up late last night the early wake up at 6.30 am felt a way too early for every one of us. Especially for Wilho getting up in the morning was hard and he barely had any time to eat breakfast.   

At evening before we heard that in this morning our group had to take a ride by a local school bus to the museum because there would not be any other transportation. The bus left at 7.30 am from the front of the Karlbotten school. We nearly missed the bus but luckily the bus driver waited us up when the girls and I run in while the boys slowly walked after.    

During the day we really liked the sightseeing tour around Nesseby area. The weather was great and views were beautiful. In the workshops at museum it was important to get to know better other participants. During the day also the aims of this project started to broaden finnish participants mind. They started to realize the reasons why they are involved in the project and what are the museums expecting from them.  

The evening in the local youth club was positive experience for finnish sámi youth. They enjoyed their time in there and everyone found interesting things to do there. Ola spent most of his evening singing sing star game along the youth from Norway and Sweden. Wilho had took his own guitar with him and played it during the evening in several occasions. Guitar hero was Petra’s and Sunna’s favorite. Our youth also took it very positive thing when the local youth that wasn’t involved in the project wanted to get to know them.

Saturday 14’th of November 2009

The second day of the youth conference in Várjjat sámi museum  

A misty morning in Nesseby. During the whole day the whole area was under a thin gray transparent blanket. Today our youth started to understand more how they work in this project and how they are starting their individual project plans and films. The day was more serious than the day before because of the information they got what the project is really about and how they are expected to work in this documentation project.  

All were pretty tired up for sitting in the class and were eager to go shopping at the local Christmas market. Wilho bargained pretty good discount of Risku and he liked shopping a lot anyway. Sunna found a pretty ring and some cool sámi bracelets from the Várjjat museum shop too.   After a day in museum and market I went shopping pizza ingredients with other project workers while the youth travelled back to School to wait for a food, in spite of a few who went to shopping too. 

While driving back to school to make pizza we had a phone call from Hanne, that she had found Petra and Wilho from outside of the grocery. We had to turn back to pick them up and saw them chilling outside the gas station.   In the evening we made and ate too much pizza and were too tired to have any organized program in the evening at school. But in the end it didn’t stop the youth for staying up half night again.