Act Peace Blog
Reflections on the training on youth advocacy in peacebuilding
Day 1
First day 🐣Waking up and being fresh, we started with an introduction of the program 😱. The aim of this first day was to introduce the challenges of the week and getting to know each other 🤩. The morning finished with an amazing and flawless «Impossible mission» as team building: You peace me on!💦 😏
The afternoon was about remembering human rights concepts and conflict resolution to create a common ground for the rest of the week💃🏽💃🏽. We had the opportunity to put that into practice with different ways of artistic expression.
We finished with our first self-reflection groups. (:
Wishing you the best: Arthur & Tom & Lena🌸🌺🌼
Day 2
Second day: yes it happened 😉
If you thought that the first day was cool, the second was even better!!🤓
For the first time in Act Peace history, we got to experiment with the intergalactical democracy. Are you surprised? 😱Yes, we travelled to Mars, and we saved the planet in only a few hours. 😎All of that was part of a brand-new conflict simulation game that we have played during the training!🥳
The afternoon was more down to earth cause we visited the Noah’s Ark of nonviolent communication concepts. We saw the peaceful giraffe and the scary jackal. We also saw the peacock and his tail emotions 🦚. Also, we saw the racoons: they are funny, tricky, and cute, even if some people may have different narrative about them. (:
After such a crazy day, we had some time to think about the tools we have got at the beautiful coast of Leman’s Lake as in a French movie.
We are sure that next day is going to be even more excited!🐣 Wishing you a wonderful day: Arthur & Tom & Lena 💅🏿
Day 3
A quick recap from the 3rd day 😉! The sun was shining ☀️and we started our days with hope. We discussed Conflicts and Conflict Analysis. Each of us was grouped in the topic we were interested in at personal, societal, national, and/or international levels. It was the time we worked on our preferred conflicts with like-minded people. 🤝✌️
The second half of the day we got to learn from each other about our works/skills/talent 🎨. We got to mobilise around a lot, which was nicer that just sitting still, isn’t it? 😌 The Bazar Competence covered mind-fullness, art, and the works from other participants. Some were inspiring, relaxing, and intriguing; however, all of them were interesting!🤗
By the end of the day, there was rain🥺but that did not stop us from having our evening activities and having a blast🫶😉
Day 4
Here we are in beautiful Evian, gazing at the landscape of Lausanne through the mirror-like Geneva Lake. We are all very sleepy and lazy from last night’s madness, but it is time to get back on track for yet another intensive day of the training.
We started the morning sessions by familiarizing with the basics of Advocacy and the major tools for it and we only stopped when the tasty smells of French cuisine summoned us to our super delicious lunch. The morning sessions were very intense and proved to be pivotal for the afternoon.
The 2nd part of the day started energetically, and we did it all: Chose a new president, brought provisional changes to our communities, had a conference with an expert from Strasbourg, thought about sending our parents to different town halls to get money and finally, got to know better to the topic of Rhetorics and Disinformation. Even though we found playing the final part very interesting, between food and fun, we made a rational choice — We went to dinner.
So here it is. The recap for the fourth day. We have some crazy karaoke ideas and if we are lucky to find some 20th century’s gadget with actual HDMI connection, we might as well sing. With this… until tomorrow.
Day 5
1, 2, 3 Action!
Hurry up! We’re late for breakfast…chop chop!
We now have to figure out:
🥖 WHAT do we want people to know?
🥩 WHY should they care?
🥖 WHAT do we want them to do?
The WHAT and WHY and WHAT…just like the sandwich of feedbacks, 🥪 and just like the sandwich of the first day 👀 the WHY gave us the essence of why ‘a holder of a stake’ would care to listen to us in an elevator 🤔
We might have felt like DEFENDERS on the first day just with a simple sandwich to eat but now each one of us are PROMOTERS of the peace revolution after three big course meals per day (and surely after all the resourceful sessions😋)! Of course, with a glass of Evian water on the side s’il vous plait 😆 ah bonjour, potatoes, legume, pork, fish…sauce yes? merci 🤭
Laughing to all these jokes all day but lowkey we’re all crying inside, how come the days were so long but we’re at the end of this week already?
Glad that the memories will be stuck with us forever, the sunsets 🌅, the tree 🌳 , the giraffe 🦒 and the sunny days. Today it started off on a serious note of how to create a campaign, working as a team, then continued with finding the holders of stake in a map, the reflective reflections, the 2 more minutes, the “is it an ambulance”, the smokey bubbles, and the rocky beach and it all somehow merged into making the day our favourite day of the ActPeace project! 😍
And so, we started the last sessions with creating the follow-up actions in order to share all the knowledge and skills we gained throughout the week. Stay tuned for all of them! 😆
We finished this day with the feeling of connection and love. And this is something to celebrate (with fireworks for example) and to keep with us. See you soon…
ACT PEACE is a project financed by the European Union’s Erasmus+ Programme.
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