With four days of iEARN completed, it was very interesting to see how much more interactive the workshops had become. I remember clearly on Monday that most of the youth were very apprehensive in participating and it's just amazing that everyone has become so much more open with each other. The workshop on Communicating Effectively Across Cultures focused on helping realize the differences in cultures and understand that not all things are universal. Substituting paper clips for money and following some instructions for behaviour, the group was split into two and were assigned completely different cultures. They then played a game where the objective was to collect as much money as possible to see how hard it really is to communicate with other cultures.

Then we made our way to paint the mural which was lots of fun and filled with deep meaning. Stephen from Taiwan stressed the symbolism of bananas as a universal fruit and being synonymous to the "dream". And to "catch it" we must go step by step on the "banana leaves" to face and overcome the challenges that life throws at us. The mural indeed is a very universal representation of the global perspectives that have gathered here at iEARN and it has been really successful.