Students’ meetings

Living on board of the Thor Heyerdahl is a once in a lifetime opportunity for us students, but there are a lot of things we need to do to keep the ship running. We must clean the ship every day, food must be cooked, the watches must do sailing work, and everything has to be organised and planned. But our ship isn’t the only thing that needs a lot of attention. There is one other thing that is just as important, which is working on a good community on board, in which everyone feels respected, and everyone has a chance to express their opinions and needs. One way of making room for honesty and exchange is a students’ meeting.

Most students’ meetings take place on Saturday, but sometimes, important topics come up and our student moderators, two students who moderate our discussion, ask for an extra meeting during the week. There are a lot of different possible topics we need to talk about. Most of them are introduced to us by the project manager, such as the coordination of the presentations. Each of us must give one presentation at some point during the journey. Our project manager offers some topics, and we try to find a solution on who will give which presentation. Just before reaching our next stop, we must decide whether we want to get our cell phones or not and if we do want to get them, we can choose two days for that. Furthermore, there are three big events which are the reason for a lot of work, not only for the adult crew members, but also for us students: ship takeovers. Often more students are interested in a job during the ship takeovers than needed. That isn’t a problem at all, they can all write an application, and the adults select one of them. But if there are not enough people interested in a job, or nobody at all, we’ve got to find a solution. Someone who is willing to do the job has to be found.

Other topics, topics that the students bring up, are also a big part of the meeting. For example, one time, we spent ages talking about the wish that we can sleep a bit longer on the days where we have school. The job of the student moderators in these discussions is to make sure that everyone gets the chance to express their opinion, without it ending in chaos, and to lead the talk towards finding a solution.

Sometimes, there are students who have a specific problem that they want to address in a students’ meeting, but for different reasons, they don’t want to address it themselves. For those, there’s always the option of talking to one of the moderators in private first, and then the moderators can carry the topic into the meeting while keeping it anonymous.

All in all, students’ meetings are a great opportunity to work on the community, but also the wellbeing of every single person on board. It is unexchangeable for our life on the ship as it is a safe space for expressing problems, wishes, ideas, and communication, deeply needed for the wellbeing of the whole community.