Jugendlager 2024

A July long weekend the Kitchener Schwaben Club received an enthusiastic group of youth coming up from Cincinnatti and Windsor to learn about the Donauschwaben Culture and make new friends. The group worked on learning a new dance, some German singing, learning some of the schwobish language and trying their skills out in the kitchen with some cultural dishes.

 

Dance

The group of youth was of varying degrees of dance skill, but that didn't stop them from working together to learn "Mein Banater Land" polka that was recently brought to North America in a dance workshop in 2023. The dance switches between the seppl polka and the kinder polka which has always proved to be a learning curve for everyone. All of the volunteers were very impressed with the Jugend's speed of learning.

 

Singing

The group got the time to work together to learn a song about appreciating the good times with friends. The song "So ein Tag" was taught by one of the local members Seppi Hoedl, and on a couple different occasions we had the youth singing before they said their final goodbyes for the weekend.

 

Language

On our third day the group was joined by Anneliese Kraehling to teach them some Schwobish language. The group got the time to connect their English words with some of the more known German words in their vocabulary, and was then able to connect those words to schowish. One of the complicated things everyone ran into, was that schwobish had many different ways to say the same thing since the language was very regional depending where our Ethnic German ancestors landed in the region. 

 

Cooking

All of your youth from the trip should be able to give an ample hand in the kitchen now. Through the help of the frauen Gruppe and specific key members Monika Hoedl and Susan Cook the group got to cook a bunch of different dishes over the weekend. The dishes ranged from Chicken paprikas, Schwaben beans and what appeared to be a crowd favourtie krautfleckerl to some nice warm kipfels and peach knodeln for desert. 

 

Some other fun the youth got up to throughout the weekend was learning how to play euchre which got played into the late night while socializing, and a tube ride down the grand river. I can only hope that the fun and experiences the youth shared continues to grow with each other and the culture that they are participating in.

 

Special thanks goes out to all the volunteers that helped make the weekend a success and to all of the groups that sent their youth up here to the great white north for a summer weekend.

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Nickolas Leipold

Canadian Verband Youth Director