Wintersport in Austria 1999

Nederlandse versie

Take a group of 9 social drop-outs and put them in a little bus on their way to Austria. Then you will get something like this:

Standing from left to right: Rad, Frans, Laura, Michelle, Jürgen, Florinda.
Down: Richard, Chantal, Raymond

It's January the 30th of 1999. In connection with our re-socialization project we were put in two little busses. Our mission was to try to live and ski with each other without giving a fractured skull to one another. It seemed to be an easy mission.......seemed.

The journey turned out a bit different than we had in mind. First of all our Navigator 'Jürgen' fell asleep regularly.... due to this sleeping we arrived in the inner city of Köln. It's a real nice city to spend some time, but our goal was Uderns ..... a metropolis in the Zillertal in Austria. In this village we had an appointment with our group psychiatrist, Frau Fankhauser, who would treat us. After an 18-hours drive and a 50 kilometers long traffic stop, we reached our temporary institution: a nice house owned by Frau Fankhauser.... far away from the wicked world. We rented the house with the Belvilla organization.

Shortly after the journey, participant Rad cooled down his pent-up emotions on our mental coach Michelle, who wasn't able to defend herself in an adequate way after an 18-hours journey. She was the first victim in a long list of expressions by meaningless violence. (first registration in the logbook for participant Rad).

First rules of the institution: skiing only under supervision of "Der Leo". Der Leo started optimistic on his responsible job. Already after 5 minutes he raised his arms to heaven and shouted out loudly in the German language:


"Mein Gott, wass für eine erschreckliche Holländische Randgruppe hab' ICH denn hier."


Our mental coach Michelle (known by Der Leo as Mariëlle) started to develop some mental problems. During a photo session she tried to escape the group for a while. But her attempt was punished immediately. Leider Michelle, tiefschnee ....

Behind the restaurant we found a participant (Chantal) who had to practice a bit more on the Oberschenkeltechnik with dobbelte Halbschwung....

Also Raymond and Frans developed some emotional conflicts in the ski-lift (anchor) after they noticed to late that a 40-centimetres difference in body length was a bit under-estimated.
(Note by Laura: "Men have difficulties in estimating lengths, haven't they ladies?")

The consequence was that Rad, who was in an anchor behind, first saw the anchor under the Frans' buttocks and under the armpits of Raymond. The next moment Rad saw Raymond try to hang on the anchor BEHIND the lift. Rad noticed that Frans knocked Raymond out of the lift with meaningless violence (Frans also got a registration in the logbook for this action). But Frans started to rise some feelings of remorse and tried to make it up with Raymond by walking up the mountain the remaining kilometers.

Symptoms of fever? Zovirax helps !!

Besides the physical efforts, our therapy also included the daily morning-sessions. During this sessions our mental coach Michelle tried to find out if mutual stresses or improvement can be noticed. Like nobody else Michelle knows how to extract the emotions in the group.

Jürgen regularly showed up too late on this sessions, because of his energy-consuming snoring during the night. Due to this snoring he was banned from the bedroom by his roommates, because his roommates started to develop some bad nightmares about crashing airplanes.

During the ski-lessons with Der Leo, participant Floor tried to position her skis in a splits. Her body wasn't trained for this and Floors' après-ski started immediately after the morning sessions.

Participant Laura wanted to know what was hidden below the snow: she knew the answer very soon ... Laura could tell us that one can find ice under the snow. She told us after a short confrontation with the ice. Result: stars in the head and a broken ski-binding...


Also Richard attracted attention among the group by eating a lot of chocolate. A group member told Richard that chocolate is a substitute for sex. During a morning session he applied to his girlfriend Chantal and said to her: "You don't eat much chocolate!" She nodded assent and Richard turned his head to the other participants with a proud glance:

You see!


Meditation was used during the day to re-establish the internal emotions. Mental coach Michelle found a nice spot in Mayrhofen with overview on the Zillertal to start her meditations with the group.

After a week of hard work, the après-ski proved to be the best medicine to introduce the harmony in the group. Michelle looks back on a successful week. In the year 2000 Michelle will continue her job to find out if her efforts had a long term effect.

The authors Frans, Laura and Raymond wish to thank you for taking the patience to read about our experiences. We want to invite you to read about our next trip made in the year 2000.