The project "One Makes a difference", the second encounter of which took place recently in Macedonia, was aiming to show young people that every particular person has a choice to fight and resist discrimination, and even stand against the whole inhuman system. Ukrainian participants Mariia Petrenko and Andrii Zabolotnikov sharing their experience in this post.
We were divided into international teams, and started our week with sport exercises and team-building games, that helped us to become friends. After that we had a workshops about discrimination. For example, ee discussed what we know about this phenomenon and who has ever faced it. We also did a small role-play, where one group was playing role of immigrants, explaining why they should be allowed to enter the country, and another group were authorities, who argued it shouldn't be done. We felt how difficult it can be to reach an agreement sometimes, even in question on which people's life depend.
Evening free time we spent having international movie-nights and discussions. We watched such movies as "Трето полувреме", a story of a Macedonian football player who fall in love in Jewish girl during the Nazi occupation in World War II. The second movie was «Hidden figures», which was dedicated to the problem of segregation and sexism in America in the middle of the XX century.
During the project each team did a research and presented stories of their nation representatives who could make a difference by themselves. Who stood against the unfair systems that they had to face in the first half of XX century in Germany, Macedonia and Ukraine. We did the research during our meetings in Prenzlau (October, 2016) and Struga (April, 2017).
During the week in Struga we had a meeting with local school students and participants of another youth project, where we presented first results of our work. Ukrainians made a short guide-tour on their posters dedicated to lives of Anton Makarenko and Andrii Sheptytskyy. Germans made presentations about life and ideas of Rosa Luxemburg and Oskar Shindler. Macedonians presented a drama about discrimination.
During the project we had enough time to talk to participants from other countries, so no we can say for sure: we have true friends abroad. Which was also an important goal of this project.
Text: Andrii Zabolotnikov
Photo: Mariia Petrenko