Travel to learn. That idea runs through everything we do, and this winter it carried a group of our young people to the Hungarian town of Bodrogkeresztúr.
There they joined Everyone Counts, a youth exchange that brought together young people from seven countries: Lithuania, Hungary, Portugal, Slovakia, Romania, Czechia, and Serbia. Erasmus+, the European Union’s funding programme for youth mobility, co-funded the exchange as part of E29’s Accreditation. The question waiting for everyone there was a big one, and it had no quick answer: what does inclusion actually look like once you live it, side by side with people you have only just met, for ten days?
Settling Into a Room Full of New Faces
Nobody handed us a textbook. The whole exchange ran on non-formal learning, which is a tidy way of saying the lessons were tucked inside the activities themselves. Discussions that grew into debates, role plays that ended in laughter, creative workshops, and a calm reflection at the close of each day all did the teaching.
We quickly found that talking is the easy part and being understood is the real craft. The group spent proper time on that gap. A sentence carries far more than its words: it carries mood, upbringing, the language you grew up speaking, the joke that only works at home. Reading all of that took the single skill we kept returning to, honest and unhurried listening.
And then the mood shifted. The careful politeness of the first days gave way to something warmer, and the room opened up. People asked the real questions, gave honest answers, and spoke about their differences as freely as everything else.
The Best Learning Came From the Toughest Moments
Put seven nationalities on one shared task and every background comes straight to the surface. That is exactly what makes a mixed international team such a good teacher.
When differences showed up, we worked through them together, slowly and out loud, and those conversations turned out to hold the deepest lessons of the whole exchange. The insight we brought home was a simple one: inclusion grows when a group learns to talk through its differences with patience and care, keeping everyone part of the same conversation. The tools were almost ordinary. Rephrase a thought. Wait a beat. Make room for the next voice.
Saying It Without the Right Words
Seven countries means a lot of half-shared languages, and sooner or later words run thin. So we reached for other things. Short videos, drawings, visual storytelling, small performances. A picture landed cleanly where a paragraph wandered.
Creativity became the one language everyone in the room spoke with ease. The photos, films, and presentations the group made still hold that spirit, the curiosity and the teamwork behind them, rather than a dry record of the timetable.
Our cultural night turned a corner of the room into a small piece of Lithuania. We draped the yellow, green and red flag across the table and loaded it with food from home: dark rye bread, a tall tower of šakotis, the spiky tree cake baked layer by layer, and bottles of gira to wash it down. Faces painted in our colours, we spent the evening handing out tastes and the stories behind each one.
What We Brought Back
Our participants came home with steadier communication skills, a wider sense of empathy, and the confidence to move toward people who are different from them. Those strengths travel well. They are just as useful in a classroom, a workplace, or a community gathering in Lithuania as they were in Hungary.
Experiences like this one are open to young people across Lithuania, and we are always happy to point the way for anyone curious about taking part. Inclusion, as this exchange showed so plainly, begins with the smallest decision to let someone else count.
Photo Gallery
A few more moments from this activity :)
Check these and more photos in the activity’s photo album.
