A website that spatializes your head.

We received all these comments of educated Iranians when a video of an Iranian female rapper appeared on the website of an American magazine. They told us that Couscousglobal.com would be better of if it would ask the opinions of the educated youth. “But we already hear the voice of this elite often enough,” says initiative taker Maartje Nevejan.

Couscousglobal.com is a sequel to ‘Couscous & Cola’ (broadcast by BNN) a show in which foreign high school students from Amsterdam debate politics,culture and much more: George W Bush, Rita Verdonk, being gay, violence against women plus Islam and Christianity. Next to this, the viewer also gets the opportunity to take a glimpse into the often harsh lives of these teenagers.

Nevejan’s series was nominated for an Emmy Award and the rights were bought by Al Jazeera International. Youth from around the world sent emails. They asked If Nevejan could come to Sudan to see how the kids were living over there. Refugees in the United States also wanted to give their opinions. “Young people feel the need to express their opinions” says Nevejan.

She gave herself a year to experiment. She started on the eighth of August with two staff members and ambassadors all around the world. The website and the Couscousglobal channel on Youtube now contain over 200 video's. There are viewers in 78 countries.

Young people express their views there about topics which concern everybody. These video’s are mostly shot in Holland, the United States, Iran and China. And there are reports about youth worldwide, like the one about Iranian female rapper Nazila.

“It really enlarges your worldview when you see how your contemporaries live in other pars of the world,” states Nevejan. ‘I want to change fear into curiosity’, is the phrase she uses when she tries to explain the mission of the project in foreign lands.

She gives an example. “When I was in Sudan I showed the youth video’s from Amsterdam. They were very surprised to see that there are girls with head scarfs there too. They thought it was fantastic when I told them that 55 percent of the youth in Amsterdam is foreign. My reply: is that as fantastic as you say it is? We had to get used to that. What would you think if half of all the kids would walk around in short sweaters? That’s the point that they start to think: that cannot be allowed, that would be a bad thing. That’s a way to help them understand that things are more complex than they think and that we in the West are not anti-Islam per se.”

“We’re not very big though,” she says in a relativizing way. Most video’s are viewed a few hundred times. And on top of that: you’re asking a lot from poor kids with slow Internet connections if you want them to upload a video. “They can send us tapes with footage, we edit it and put it online. At that point they’re like: we are part of a global movement.”

Young people can send their own voice into the world. For example, female rapper Nazila shows that Iranian women aren’t suppressed, uneducated beings that never heard of Western (and thus for them foreign) music. Nevejan wants to give Couscousglobal.com out of hand when her year of experimenting on the web has ended. She wants to go on with new things and leave her steadily growing child in good hands. “Write it down: It’s up for adoption.”

www.couscousglobal.com