Understanding and playing a role

By Kunal Chabaldas - @KChabaldas - #YourTurnChallenge - #day4

It seems like the writing habits at the nights of this challenging week are already turning into a routine. Honestly, I had to watch the TV report “En Tierra Hostil” episode about Ceuta during last night itself, to write the #day3 post straight after, and today my attention was on the “echoes and interactions” around social media sites on and off. Therefore many actions and reactions around this matter are still very fresh on my mind.

This whole issue kind of reminds me of a recent article by Jordi Evole written after the Paris attacks a few weeks back, Jordi is by far the most appreciated and highly valued Spanish journalist at present. The headline was “Yo no quería escribir este artículo” – its meaning in English is “I didn’t want to write this article”. The piece is very self-critical with the way we live in Spain and rest of Europe, hinting that we (all of us, including himself) kind of live in our own “micro-world” of constant insignificant news, entertainment and gossiping. He refers to these as “weapons of mass distraction”, because we only get shocked by deaths when they happen near us. Of course we are impacted and highly vulnerable in such cases, but he’s saying to himself that he should have reacted the same way when hearing about deaths in places like Irak, Nigeria, Pakistan or Siria. This was the reason behind chosing the headline, because next week his writing will again be about our “weapons of mass distraction”.

Surely in yesterday’s post I was no way near as self-critical as he was, but I could have perfectly used the exact same headline. In Ceuta, we also awake our concern for problems in excluded neighbourhoods when they show TV shows, like Tuesday’s, at prime-time and on national TV. As mentioned yesterday, deprived neighbourhoods do exist in most Spanish and European cities, it’s Ceuta’s precise location that makes it more vulnerable and targeted – nothing else. So we locals also get annoyed because the town is really much more than that (as I highlighted in day2), and many people in the rest of the country recall our town only after watching these kind of shows on TV.

The actual, more visible and authentic Ceuta, the peaceful, warm and multicultural side is only known by people who actually travel here to visit (which are unfortunately very few, despite the potential of such an enclave). This is precisely the reason why I would love to see testing of p2ptravel or collaborative city models in this town, to make it much more visible, well-known, accessible and modern. So that when outsiders hear about it they avoid mental barriers caused by such tremendous personal stories shown on TV, which are doing enormous harm to Ceuta’s image. As highlighted before, these would fit in perfectly with the Sharitories project approach by OuiShare. It must require however, willingness by local authorities as well as citizens (probably, much more openness to adapt than anything else).

role

What do I do well?

Time to think about today’s question by Winnie. Taking into account how I have somehow discussed about OuiShare, p2ptravel and the potential of the collaborative economy in every single post. I guess that’s probably what I do best – finding simple tools and applying it to real life. I try to apply some common sense and look for simple approaches in general, so using some of the vast amount of technological tools that are available in a useful and constructive way is definitely something that I could teach about.

role

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no techie or programming geek, like many others I just try to play a role to simplify tasks or use them in a way that has good potential. For instance as soon as I found out about Ceuta Dreams, a small business that’s starting to run high quality walking roots by a well known local historian and archaeologist, I immediately told them about p2p travel tools. They were delighted and today, Ceuta Dreams can attract potential clients via Trip4Real, a well known Spanish p2p travel experience platform. I have personally been to some of Jose Manuel’s walking tours and I can assure they are fantastic, exactly the kind of experiences tourists tend to look for nowadays, and thanks to them I’m now aware of plenty of more facts about my hometown that were completely unknown to me.

Trip4Real

So yes, this would be a field that I know pretty well and I have intentions to start teaching and thereby practising my presentation skills, which has quite some room for improvement. I will be looking forward to playing a more active role in this way, hopefully doing good for myself as well as others.

 

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This post has been submitted as #day4 of the #YourTurnChallenge – an experiment promoted by @winniekao and @ThisIsSethsBlog

Huge number of contributions by bloggers from all over the world: http://yourturnchallenge.tumblr.com/

My contributions so far:

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