By Dávid Garai-Korzim

We’ve arrived to Sri Lanka on the 2nd of June to set the summer turn of 2015 going. One of the specialty of this group is there’s quite an overlap with the previous group in terms of attendees. We have here ‘Lara’, ‘Lea’, ‘Bella’ and ‘Marcus’ from the pervious group supplemented by ‘Gábor’, ‘Sergei’, his sister ‘Brigitta’ and their mother ‘Eleonóra’.

Gergely Vaskuti is the leader of this turn. We also have Pál Vaskuti psychologist with us, only conducting one psychotherapy this time, and Chance Program first timer Szilvia Takács psychologist.

Lea spent the two weeks between the turns in Thailand with her mentor, and now they’ve returned for two more months to continue with the therapy. Lea, Bella and Marcus went home to Hungary between the turns and met each other several times during this short time, and there was one time the spring turn attendees have all met -excluding Lara and Réka, obviously. The 14 years old Gábor is an ‘old hand’ for the program: he was only 12 when he first attended the program in the summer of 2013 and been here several times since. His status is a bit different from the other mentored: since he is psychologically healthy, instead of having therapies his objective is to get to know the program and psychology itself in greater depth and to make up for his studies. Sergei, also 14, is here because of depression and his sister and mother are here to solve the problems inside the family together. This is the first time since the beginning of the program that somebody could see the program at work before attending it: Sergei and his family travelled here in the previous turn to see how things go around here and joined us in the afternoon activities, in our meals and we also introduced ourselves to them.

The headcount is 14 at the moment – 3 psychologists/mentors, 3 mentors, 6 mentored and Gábor in his special status. We’re going to have a big ‘traffic’ of people as usual in the summer turns. ‘Milan’ from the previous turn is going to visit us along with ‘Zalán’ from the 2014 winter turn. After them Marcus’s family (parents and two siblings) is arriving, then Lea’s mother (she was here in the previous turn) and sister, finally Bella’s father and two sisters (in the previous turn her mother was with us). One could separate this turn’s first two months from the month of August: many of the mentored are going home at the end of July and new people are coming in August.

It’ll be strange to see old, not-so-old and brand new fellows together. To see people unfamiliar with each other though sharing the Chance Program as a common experience. This is one of the many advantages of this kind of work: there are no similar turns, similar people, so we can observe ourselves in many different situations with many types of people. Now is not the first nor the last time that the Sri Lankan adventure- and psychotherapy gets started with the leadership of Gergely Vaskuti.