21.7.2003
Speech by Lassi Saastamoinen at the opening ceremonies of the camp:
Dear young guests, host parents, Lion Brothers and Ladies
You have come to Central Finland, to a rural town called Kiuruvesi.
We are used to calling our town a small one, because it has only about ten thousand inhabitants.
Agriculture has provided an income for most of the people until today.
We produce the biggest amount of milk in the whole of Finland.
Lately Kiuruvesi has been specializing in organic farming,
which means farming without using artificial fertilizers or pesticides.
We Lions of the district Northern Savo have wanted to organize this camp
on the basis of Lion principles, which are said in a nutshell in the sentence
öLeave your country better for the next generationö. Maybe for many of you this
is the only chance to visit Finland and learn something about Finnish society.
So hopefully you will try to benefit from it as much as you can.
When you stay in different families, you will see how people live here,
what their means of living are, their habits, how they build their houses
to cope with the cold winters, which starts in November and end in April.
You might also wonder how we manage to survive the bears and mosquitos.
Also, for us Finns, this is a chance to wipe out some of the stereotypical
views of Finland you might have; we do not have any polar bears running on
the streets or anywhere else, for that matter.
The purpose of this camp is to show you some of the ways in which Finnish
people spend their free time. You will learn what kind of music we listen to,
what kind of dances we dance and how we enjoy as well as make use of the
hundreds of thousands of lakes that we have. You will also experience some of
our summer cottages with saunas, and see how it feels to live so close to nature.
What really is Finnish baseball, pesäpallo in Finnish, it reminds you of regular
baseball, but there are quite a few differences between these two games.
One of the most important goals of this camp is for you to get to know each other,
so that after the camp you will understand more of other cultures and habits and
be more tolerant towards people from all over the world. As a retired teacher
I would also like to stress what a perfect possibility you have to practise your
foreign language skills, so please do not stick to people of your own nationality only.
Maybe you can also learn some words of our beautiful language which
has a lot of vowels such as öaö, öäö and ööö. We will try to teach you some useful
phrases in Finnish that will come in handy when communicating with the locals.
All in all, we Lions, hosts and hostesses are very pleased to have you here.
You seem to be a nice bunch of young people, and I am sure we will have a great time together this week.
So, once again, welcome!
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