Lex van Bergen
Meet Lex van Bergen,
Project Leader
🕵♂In daily life I am....
"I work at a learning and work center and day care facility for people with disabilities. Here, I coach and guide people in their personal development with the goal of eventually returning to the workforce. In my free time, I enjoy going out with our dog Sjors; Sjors' mother is from Bosnia."
🌏 I work for Out of Area because...
"I once went on a project to Bosnia as a student during my Social and Cultural Work program. That week made such an impression on me and left me with a feeling that I wanted to experience many more times. With this in mind, I then did an internship at Out of Area as part of my program and stayed on as a project leader. I work at Out of Area because I hope to share that one feeling I felt during my first project with other students I supervise."
💭My best memory is....
"Although I'm still quite young, I've been lucky enough to have made many wonderful trips with Out of Area in ten years. That's why it's quite difficult to choose one specific memory. Although there is one moment I'll never forget: it was a speech by the mayor in the city of Travnik during the FutureA Festival in which he indicated that on that day, for the first time since the war, there had been no divisions among the children and they were playing together."
📸 The photo below tells you...
"In addition to all the school projects that are organized annually, of which I am one of the project leaders, Out of Area also organizes the FutureA Festival in Bosnia-Herzegovina once a year. This is a traveling festival where we visit four different cities in one week with one main goal: making as many children as possible happy. I always go along as a volunteer on the Recce team: the set-up and take-down team. The festival is the highlight of the project season for me; it's what I look forward to all year long. Giving so many children the day of their lives with such a wonderful group of people is the most beautiful thing there is."
✈A project is a succes when...
"For me, the success of a project often lies in several small moments of happiness. Of course, in broad terms, a project is a success when that one classroom is redecorated and has a nice splash of color on the wall. But during a project week, many more beautiful, spontaneous things happen. For me, a project is truly successful when we leave something behind that the children will remember there forever."
