Kawkowo — crossing borders
Within the project of Youth Peacebuilder Multipliers we wanted to gave the local community of Kawkowo (PL) something in return for their hospitality. We were invited to a elementary school to present the diversity of Europe.
The most challenging fact about the school activity was the short preparation time. Planning 90 minutes of a lesson within 180 minutes is quite hard. Intuitively we organised a brainstorm about structure, topics, methods and goals. We had three international moderators (Elif, Muhsine and Igor) and one national coordinator (Marcin), which has gathered the ideas and was also a translator at school later. Every moderator had to prepare his/her individual presentation about the country, where he/she lives in. And that took in the end the most of the time.
We didn’t do any evaluation after the lesson, but we felt that the teachers and the kids were satisfied. Of course paying attention for over an hour is always hard, especially for children, so we could have shorten the national presentations and made some more interaction. Also bringing some more items or even food from our countries would be great. Touching or even tasting the culture is always a good idea. In our opinion there was also a slight lack of linking our cultures. We could have picked more surprising pictures from our countries too, maybe even skipping the presented sights. But in the end you never know, what could surprise the kids (dervish dancers in skirts or baklava looking like lasagne?)
A very good example of an desired story in such a lesson was the earthquake in Skopje. We told them about the solidarity of the world, about worlds’ altruism about how Skopje thanked the helpers (by naming its streets eg. Warsaw street or Brussels Street, where Igor lives).
We were surely touched by the warm welcome of the kids, which were hugging us and asking us to sing in their improvised ‘memoirs’. Most of us would do that again, even tomorrow ;)
