Tuesday, January 31, 2012

"Stop Labeling Yourself" Day 7

Yesterday was the day were we had to put into practice all the things we learned during our training in Vidrike. Indeed, today me and the rest of our team (Alexa, Ieva, Serhan, Stella, Michel and Csaba) all went to Valga to give a training to 25 youngster in the town of Valga which is at the border of Estonia and Latvia. This is the big finale for us as it's the day where we will have to demonstrate and practice what we learned.

Our day started quite early, we woke up at 7 am to be ready to leave Vidrike at 8am. I must say that waking up was not an easy as we had a tiring day the day before. In the bus taking us to Valga, pretty much all of us were freezing and sleepy but definitely ready to do our job. We were all very excited and did not really know what to expect from our target audience, we knew there will be some youth workers and other high school kids. But we did not know whether they would be open to share with us their opinions and a bit about who they are, so the suspense was complete.

We finally arrived in Valga, we had the nice surprise that the place where our training course was taking place was great. The first participants arrived as we were finishing our set up and we quickly understood that our audience was mainly composed of girls aged between 15 and 17 years old. Straight from the beginning we tried to make them feel comfortable and show them that today they will learn something in a different way than they do it at school. Our agenda was quite heavy as we decided to cover different topics included: exploring stereotypes, confronting stereotypes and my identity. We knew that we had to be really careful with our time management in order to be able to cover all the topics of the day but at the end it turned out that we ran all the tasks in time.

We first started our session with some games to break the ice and make everyone more familiar with each other. After that we started discussing our different topics, the participants seemed quite interested but only a few of them were spontaneously talking. So we decided to make a round check where everyone gets to speak. This took a bit more time but at least we got the chance to hear the opinion of everyone. After our stereotype game we discovered that our participant had quite some strong stereotypes about different things that drew our attention like the stereotypes they had about Russians and Muslims. We had some nice conversation where different participants explained that it's not good to generalize a group of people based on a specific situation and that we all should go beyond our stereotypes to discover who the other s are and think for ourselves and be the architect of our own decisions.

The rest of the session was also very interesting. I believe that the part that the participants liked the most was ''My identity" where they all had to tell others in small groups 5 things that defines them as a person. I think some of them went deep in the subject while for others it was a bit harder to talk about themselves and they were not willing to share their privacy with strangers, which we understand.

Out of this experience, we really learned how to practice and pass on what we have learned from our training week in Vidrike. Our team was really happy about what we did in Valga, our session went smoothly, we had fun. And from the feedback we got from our trainees, they also had a nice day. I think that most of them got the point of the training which is to go beyond the stereotypes that we all can have and explore new roads. For some of them it was not clear what stereotypes was about but in general we all agreed that this subject needs much more time and that one day training is not enough.

Jalal

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