After visiting Milan in last weeks story, we are travelling 9683.34 km to the South East this week, to Medan, Indonesia.
From the 14th and 21st of April, we gathered with 13 participants from Indonesia, Greece, the Philippines, Paraguay, Ghana and Peru to kick start our journey to an entirely new toolkit on Peace Education - 'Building Bridges: Youth Work for Peace and Dialogue'!
Besides working hard on the vision and mission of the toolkit and developing its contents, we met with local children groups from our member organisation KKSP. The work that they do there is more than inspiring, and we hope we can soon bring you a story from there as well.
International solidarity at work
It’s more than a week since we parted ways in Medan, Indonesia for the Building Bridges Toolkit Development Workshop; yet I still feel ecstatic and welcomed from the host organization, YKKSP, and the main organizer, IFM-SEI. Truly, it is astounding to witness international solidarity at work.
The past six days we’ve spent together gave me the opportunity to tell my country’s story and also, listen to theirs as well. These different narratives altogether have provided me with a deeper understanding of peace and human rights at a local, regional and global context.
New and exciting ways
More than this, IFM-SEI was able to introduce new and exciting ways of handling the program. As someone working in the development sector, I’ll surely be adapting these when I facilitate the development of knowledge materials and conduct of peacebuilding exercises.
Kudos to IFM-SEI and YKKSP for successfully organizing the Building Bridges toolkit development workshop! It was a pleasure working with all of you, and I cannot wait to read the fruit of our labour.
By Rye Manuzon, Center for Youth Advocacy and Networking, Inc., Philippines
Voices of young people
The Building Bridges project has given me the opportunity to listen again to the voices of young people in my country regarding hopes and concerns working on democracy, inclusion and peace in Paraguay.
The workshop in Medan has been six intense days where I met a group of people committed to youth work and non-formal education, who filled me with energy to believe again that together we can create the bridges for a better world.
Build a useful tool for youth workers
This group of unknown people easily became great co-workers and friends thanks to their shared same values. We generated a fabulous work team and a very friendly atmosphere and we put all our efforts into a single goal: to build a useful tool for youth workers that we hope it will be useful expand messages of peace and inclusion.
I learned the importance to dedicate enough time to team building as the key element to build collaboratively a toolkit that reflects the multicultural environment in which was created.
By Celeste Gomez Romero, Juventud País Solidario, Paraguay
Next week, our stories series will take us back all the way to February 2019. We will discover the theories of Socialist Education as developed during our Study Session 'Peers 2.0: Peer Education for Democratic Citizenship'.
Have you been part of this or another IFM-SEI activity? Do you want to tell us about your experience? Send us an email to comms@ifm-sei.org!
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