Happy Dane getting to know Aspen youths

Local youth center takes on its first-ever intern

Click to Enlarge Browse Aspen Times Photos Pia Rasmussen, a Danish intern at the Aspen Youth Center, has a little fun with The Game of Life with Lizette Arballo as part of the job. (John Colson/The Aspen Times) Get News Feeds

John Colson
The Aspen Times
Aspen, CO Colorado
February 21, 2008

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ASPEN — The people of Denmark, according to a recent study by the University of Leices­ter in England, are the happiest people in the world, and one of them is happy to be living in Aspen for the next few months.

“I know! We are!” agreed Pia Isabella Holm Rasmussen about the study declar­ing the Danes’ glee.

Rasmussen, 23, is an intern with the Aspen Youth Center, hoping to work with local teenagers and learn all she can before returning home to finish a degree in “social education.”

She is the first-ever intern at the center and has been on the job for about three weeks, getting to know the organization’s ins and outs and making instant friends with its client base — the kids from Aspen’s schools.

During a recent visit to the youth center by a reporter, Rasmussen was playing The Game of Life with 9-year-old Lizette Arballo, and apparently losing.

“I just lost my job, and now I have to find a new career,” she said with a laugh, noting that the game is not known in Denmark, although she has played Monopoly before.

Rasmussen, who has been in college for about a year and a half, said she came to Aspen “first of all because it’s totally different from Denmark. I wanted to see the difference, to see how they work with children.”

Her degree, she explained, will enable her to do a wide variety of work in the area of social services.

“I will be able to work with people from zero to 100 [ years old],” along with drug addicts, the homeless and other groups in need of assistance, she said.

Another reason she chose Aspen as the scene of her second internship (the first was at a shelter for the homeless and oth­ers in Denmark) is that she was unsure about the concept of nonprofit organiza­tions.

The government takes care of society’s needs at home, such as providing free education, free medical care and paying young adults a wage of sorts to attend college, she said. But she had to pay her own way over to the United States for the intern­ship and is staying with her sister, Gitte, and brother-in-law, Brian Anzine.

There are youth centers in Denmark, she said, but they are run by the govern­ment and families pay a very small charge for their children’s use of the facil­ities.

“It’s nothing compared to here,” she said, noting that here kids and their fam­ilies pay up to a few dollars a day to use the youth center (other than those fami­lies granted scholarships).

Although she’s only been on the job three weeks, she said she has noticed dif­ferences on several levels between this area and her home.

“The children are more polite,” she observed, when they address her or oth­er adults.

She said that the government supplies all equipment in Danish youth centers. The televisions, for example, are much smaller than the televisions at the Aspen Youth Center, she said, and there are more game tables and other equipment for kids to play on here.

Among the lessons Rasmussen expects to learn here is how to handle conflicts among children, something with which she already has had some experience.

Rasmussen said that while donations to government facilities in Denmark are possible, it is rare, because the tax rate of 50 to 60 percent is deemed sufficient for the government’s needs.

There is a culture of giving in Denmark, she continued, “but it’s more for other countries.” Danes donate to the Interna­tional Red Cross and other relief and aid agencies, rather than to organizations within their own country.

Rasmussen believes Danish content­ment comes mainly from her home country’s socialized education, health care and other social security systems.

Denmark’s first-place finish in the study narrowly beat out Switzerland, Austria and Iceland. Britain came 41st, 18 places behind the United States.

Still, she said, she might like to try liv­ing in the States for longer than her intern­ship, which ends July 1.

“I really think the American people are nice,” she explained. “They’re curious, they come up to you and ask you things,” whereas in Denmark people seem to keep more to themselves.

Sarah Visnic, executive director of the Aspen Youth Center, said she hopes the internship program will become a perma­nent part of the center’s mission, though she is concerned about how the organiza­tion will house future interns.

“We hope this is a start to a continuous internship program,” Visnic said, noting that the addition of an adult with super­visory experience is a great help to the center’s staff.

jcolson@aspentimes.com