MasterPeaces back home
MasterPeaces back home
With great satisfaction the 12 Belgian youth returned on the 13th of August from a youth exchange in the Caucasus in Russia.
In the exchange project, called MasterPeaces, they met up during 10 days with youth from Israel, both Jewish and Palestinian and from Chechnya. A lot of youth referred to it as ‘an interesting emotional rollercoaster’. The youth from Chechnya came from our partner organisations, Sintem (harmony) and the Israeli-Palestinian youth through Sadaka Reut (friendship).
What happened back there in the Caucasus?
It all started for the Belgium group on Sunday night the second of August in Brussels airport. Some participants where there already one hour before the agreed hour. They wanted to leave anything up to chance to participate in the project. After Brussels Airport we landed in Moscow where we had to switch planes and wait for several hours. Then we took a plane to Mineralnye Vody where our Chechnyan host was waiting for us. A few hours later the Israeli-Palestinian group also landed there. Together we took a bus to Nalchik where we would spend the first five days of the exchange. We arrived around six in the afternoon, some of us where by then already 24 hours non-stop on the road with barely sleep.
Get to know each other
The first days were consecrated at getting to know each other personal stories but also each others culture and conflict. And of course discovering a bit the surrounding we were in.
During the first day we played some name games (to get each other name), shared our expectations and did teambuilding exercises. Some things that came up in the expectations where quite interesting. Of course people were eager to get to know new people from a different country and share some methods how to work at peace. But people from Sadaka Reut had the interesting expectation that the Belgian should recognise that there is a conflict in their own country.
On the second we deepened the connection with a very emotional workshop guided in three small groups called ‘Personal Stories’. Participants where asked to share three crucial moments in there life linked to the conflict or injustice in general.
A story came up where a young Chechnyan girl saved a life by given mouth-to-mouth after her dance teacher had a stroke. Although it’s not done in her culture to touch a man let alone do mouth-to-mouth she decided to do it. Her conclusion was that sometimes to save people or even to live peaceful together one should once in a while be ready to give up his own cultural principles if needed. Another story was a Jewish girl having a birthday party with friends. In the middle of the evening her boyfriend gets a phone call that he needs to come immediately to his army base. The second Lebanon war was happening. He had to leave the party to go fighting in the war. These sessions were very emotional for everybody. Tears rolled over some faces. But we felt the connection between the youth growing.
The next day we were looking at what each from us could do in their own country linked to the conflict. This was done in national groups. In the Belgium group it wasn’t so easy to see what can be done and especially what we can do when it comes to the Flemish-Walloon conflict. Some general thoughts were raised on language. There was a suggestion that Dutch & French should be the first and second language of every person living in Belgium. This could be done by investing more time in the schools on these languages but also to stimulate or even to oblige that pupils study one year in the other part of the country. Another point was to publish a cultural youth magazine and to spread in the different communities or to put subtitles in the other language on the news of the public television stations.
In each of those nights of the first three days there were cultural evenings of the different youth. The Chechnyan performed a small play on typical cultural behaviour within the community and the family and performed some traditional dancing. Playing a quiz and some games to win ingredients to bake waffles was the idea developed by the Belgian group. The Israeli-Palestian night was a mixture. Their night had of course two different parts, a Jewish and Arabic part. We saw a traditional wedding ceremony of the Palestinians and discovered the diversity of backgrounds in Jewish society through a very nice dressing up performance.
The next day was the only fully free day for the participants in the exchange. They decided that they wanted to go for one day to the Elbrus, the highest mountain of Europe and Russia. We went up with a cable car up to a height of 3500 meters where we had an incredible view on the snowy peaks of the Elbrus and other mountains in the Caucasus.
By sunrise of the next day we took are stuff from Nalchik and move to a kind of luxury hotel in Essentuki.
In Essentuki we focused the following days on exchanging methods on ‘Art & Peacebuilding’, the theme of the exchange. Each partner organisation had to chance to facilitate between 4 and 6 workshops.
Workshop of Sintem
On one of the days we had to get in couples. Each one had to tell the other a situation in his/her life where (s)he was humiliated. After this was done, the participants had to paint each other face in that way that it would help the other to overcome the humiliation. To create a new face that would heal the negative feelings of that situation. An amazing experience with a lot of intense emotions.
Workshop of Sadaka Reut
In another workshop we had to chance after years and years to play once more with lego cubes. As a teambuilding exercise we had to make a replica of a construction made by the workshop leaders. We were divided in 3 groups of 5 persons. Each had a different role: the coordinator, the architect and two constructors. Only the architect could go and watch the original design. He had to explain to the constructors how to build it. The clue was that the construction was terribly hard to reproduce and that only through cooperation between the different teams it made sense. But the exercise wasn’t about the final product but about the process how to get to the product.
Workshop of U Move 4 Peace
U Move 4 Peace initiated a ‘songs of resistance’- workshop. In small groups people were asked to create a song on a theme. In the background a hiphop-beat was playing. The youth could express themselves in nice rap rhymes. In the end the different performed for each other. It was a blazing activity.
The last days was fully consecrated to evaluation and follow-up. Participants gathered ideas what could be done with the information and methods they gathered throughout the exchange.
The ideas popped up …
We concluded an amazing experience and thanked all those who were involved: the participants, the partners and of course our different hosts in Nalchik and Essentuki.
