Medium Challenge: visit a church

For studiecoaching this period, we must gather 15 points worth of challenges. In my previous blog, you can read how I gathered my first 10 points. In this blog, I visited a church and talked with the people there. This is a medium challenge worth of 5 points.

In my home city (Oss) is 60,5% Catholic. I have not been baptized, this makes me part of the other 39,5%. I am not religious, but I do believe there is something bigger than us humans. The church I visited is called “De Grote Kerk”. I went on an off-hour witch mend only the chapel was open. In the chapel, you can light a candle and pray to god. When I was there, there were 2 other people. To start the conversation, I asked them what they came to do. The first female sad she came here every Sunday to light a candle for the wealth of the people she knows best. The second female came to pray for her man who was ill. The conversation wends on and I asked if they believed everything from the bible. This because I believe there is something bigger, but I don’t believe what is said in the bible. The first Female did not believe everything, but she believed in the big story. The second female had the same thought as I did. She believes there is someone watching over the human kind, but she does not believe in the heroic stories told about God.

Looking back at the experience, I realized that both females came to ask God for something out of there reach. I believe that is exactly where religion is for. I do not believe in the stories told about any all mighty god, although it is very relaxing and easy to know you have a God looking out for you and making sure you have a good life. The experience did not change my mind on believing in god, but I have gained some more information about the people believing in god.

Large Challenge: Jan Cunen

For the large challenge, we went with 3 of our group members to the Jan Cunen Museum. Everybody chose a sector they wanted to write about. If you’re interested in the other sectors you can visit the blogs of Dean and Ruud.

The sector I’m focusing on is called “power vrouwen van oranje”. The exposition was about the Dutch queens. In the Netherlands, we either have a King or a Queen. This year it is king Willem Alexander, but until 2013 it was Beatrix who was head of the Netherlands. The exposition wanted to show that women are powerful, even more than were already aware of. The latest 5 queens all had a separate section in which they showed art of that queen.

It was a fun day and I learned more than I thought I would. In the Netherlands, women are relative equal than man, comparing it to a culture like that of Turkey for example. I think that it is good that women have much respect in our culture, Aldo I don’t think women and men are equal. We both have our own strengths and weaknesses and that is a good thing.

Obviously, im a man and I respect women. I have learned this from my parents and I can understand that this is different in other cultures. In Europa, it isn’t that long ago that woman’s where only housekeepers. Today they still earn less for the same job as a male would. In my point of view this is good for jobs like the military where male’s strength comes in, but for jobs like account, this should not be affected. I might be prejudiced to say that male have muscle and are stronger, but on the other hand, a woman is better at languages than most man. As I said earlier, we both have our strengths and weaknesses.

Themeweek 2 visit: Wednesday

Themeweak 2 was all about different cultures. I visited the Wednesday. As all days, we started with a short informational presentation. After the presentation, we had a speaker named Maarten Thissen. He talked about leadership and how these differences in other cultures. After the break, we watched the documentary called “white is also a color”. At the end of the movie, everybody had to send the first 3 words that came to mind. From these words is a spiderweb was made witch you can see in the top right corner. For the second part of the day, I followed the workshop “sales make the world go round”. I found it an interesting day. The first speaker was a bit stutter which made the message unclear for me. I strongly disagreed with the documentary which was shown. She (Sunny Bergman) acted like she made a scientific documenter. If you ask me this is not what it was. The documentary had a lot of mistakes and was not objective at all.

The second half of the day was much better in my point of view. The speaker Arnold Steenbeek, taught us a lot about hard sales. It was very interesting, and I have learned a lot. We also had a nice class with a lot of exchanged student which made it even more interesting. Once I was home and looked back on the day, I realized the “normal” things are not that normal. What I think is normal is really weird for people from other cultures. For example, saying what’s on your mind. A typical Dutch thing. In other cultures, this is rude to do. In China for example, can’t you disagree with your leader. I also discussed the documentary with other people and, I wasn’t the only one with a strong disagreement. Once home I found a video form The Snijtafel about the documentary. In that video, they debunked the movie with some strong facts.