Committee member Elyn den Hollander and another crew member are in charge of the central station, a small corner on the ground floor of the Forum. This place is bustling with fellow committee members, crew members who need a key or a loudspeaker, and AID-freshies who have lost their group along the way. The portophone screeches out an announcement now and then – ‘Aiesec and Thymos can’t be found at the Campus games; can you phone them, question mark, over’ – or a telephone rings. ‘I don’t know where the sunblock is; just put it on the shopping list.’ ‘It’s quiet again now, but it was pretty hectic in the morning,’ says Elyn. ‘ We had some start-up problems: we couldn’t get the tea and coffee ready; keys couldn’t be traced; crew members showed up all at once to get their bags; the first aid kits were still with one of the members at home. Things like that. But I’m now mainly busy with re-uniting lost AID freshies with their mentor families.’ The special calamity telephone has not gone off yet. ‘It did yesterday, but only during practice.’
Record number
A record number of 1638 first year students have signed up for the AID this year. The AID committee has taken up extra precautions because of the hot weather. Elyn: ‘We have placed portable water points everywhere, and the municipality will hand out bottles of water to participants during the sports day tomorrow. We don’t want them to be dehydrated.’ Elyn den Hollander