Today I would like to write more about our work here. First post will be about European club we lead in the library. First about difficulties in leading such club. The name of the club is very general, so from one point it let you be creative and doesn’t “lock” you in some topic, or some scenarios and objectives. But there is one big disadvantage - it is so unclear that its hard to invent some plan and topics. Generally the aim is to talk about different mobility programs for youth, cultural and social life of youth in EU. Cultural and social life...honestly when you are a citizen of a country you don't think about it much, everything is normal, not very interesting to share, because you think people in other countries do similar things (which is mostly true). And are we aware what is it like in other european countries? not really. Europe is too varied to know everything when you don't live in a concrete country. Mobility programs… thats clear, but it can be shared during one or two sessions..and we have same participants each week. What to do then? Now, Ill try to summarise what we have done.
First club was very stressful. However, idea on topic appeared very quickly, from the first days we were asking what we are doing here and the word “volunteer” didnt explain anything, as if it was said in Chinese, what's more even after explaining very thoroughly what is our mission, people couldn't understand it, so we decided to explain who are EVS volunteers and why we could go abroad. So our first club was about EVS programme. A lot of people came, it didn't make it easier to lead, I remember I was very scared. We also didn't have any good experience in facilitating such club, our leaders skills were 0.00% (I can say it from perspective of few months). We did it more like simple lecture and that wasn’t best idea, too little involvement from participant side. It isnt easy at all to present information in creative way to make people involve….
So after this not very fortunate session, we lea one more about the european programmes, different volunteering possibilities within other programs, this one was better prepared, with less stress and nicer results. After these first struggles our work became more and more interesting and easy. We still have problems with picking the topics, as we would like to raise discussions on issues which are also interesting to the participants and concern them in some way. Our aim is also to show the point of view which our societies have.
To present shortly the topics we analysed with our participants
- human rights (few clubs with interactive exercises, which let us and participants think more thoroughly about our rights and different aspects and situations connected with them),
- citizenship (where we first raise the topic of ideal citizen’s characteristic and what it means to belong to the country, what are the aspects of being a good citizen and then we played the board game which concerns this topic and shows some mechanisms of society),
- stereotypes (funny discussion and drawing activity which presented out stereotypes about different nations, and the possible result of stereotyping),
- death penalty (this topic isn't that much connected with Europe, but important in world, so we decided to lead discussion about it and it finished by movie club,when we watched “Dead man walking”),
- homosexuality (issue which is very “hot” in many european countries, we made few activities to discover attitude of Ukrainians to this issue and share the results of similar discussions in our countries),
- presentation about our countries (short quiz about basic information and cultural and historical facts about France and Poland), finally
- gender roles (answering the question what is gender, what are our rights and what are the stereotypes of women and men taught us from childhood and what image of men and women present media and adverts)
- language barrier and intercultural communication (we learnt how communication can look like when we cannot find common language, how to break language barrier and how the language can show the nature of nations).
All materials can be easily find on the Internet, here I will give some links:
http://www.amnesty.org.uk and other websites of amnesty
Internet is full of different materials, so if you have concrete idea you can always find some help. And very good idea is talking with other volunteers - it always may bring many various creative ideas!
And finally some photos from our clubs:
