The aim of Twinsite was to build a site together with a Dutch school on a topic we had to decide together....The invitation came in September 99 and after much brainstorming and e-mail exchanges we thought Time would give us much material to work on... I believe the second project we had been invited to, This is Our Time, triggered our imagination towards this field. The fact that the project was due February 2000 also reinforced the idea of the millenium and time.

     Our fiercest enemy was time itself ...the 3 voluntary students who had accepted the challenge were almost at the end of the year and facing exams...I had other classes to take care of...so we had very little time to meet....e-mailing and ICQ in the evening after classes were precious allies.

     In November we finally came to an agreement on the areas we would cover (not an easy task as time is, at the same time, short and vast) : an exhibition we visited at the Amro bank in Sao Paulo gave us the idea and the material to work on a Brazilian -Dutch timeline and many students had also found quotations about time in books or the net, together with articles that came up in magazines... The Dutch students decided to illustrate this time paradox - long and short and the name for our site became a play on words - The Time of Your Life.

     The different seasons on the two continents were also a constraint as our school in Brazil enjoys its long summer holidays from mid-December to mid-February and I did not know if I would see any of my students working once they had started vacations. So together with the Dutch school we decided on the layout and themes before that and we worked, each on our side of the world, exchanging e-mails and chatting. At Christmas, one of the students sent me the flash flag that illustrates the timeline...I couldn't have received a better gift. Another one worked on the scanning of pictures and the content of the timeline. We were racing against time but managed to present the project some hours before the deadline. Our site was among the first four!

     It was a great experience for the students who participated, as they saw that, by working hard together, it is possible to have results, a good example for the others in the class who had felt like doing it but had given up and a tremendous challenge for me...to keep things going. I do not regret a single minute spent on it, even though, when I look back, I think there were better ways of having dealt with some aspects. But one cannot be perfect and you learn from experience.