Programme & action: ERASMUS+, Key Action 1: Training Course
Venue: Zadar, Croatia
Dates: 23 – 31 October 2016
Participants: Adam Telička, Zita Kučerová, Katarzyna Gattnar
Please read the info-pack, daily programme & project official report
Participating countries: Croatia, Macedonia (FYROM), Italy, Czech Republic, Spain, France, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria and Slovakia
Hosting organisation: Udruga za unaprjeđivanje suvremenih životnih vještina “Ostvarenje” Association for improvement of modern living skills “Realization”
Project report:
While Czech Republic gets freezed below zero, I get nostalgic about temperatures just few days ago in Zadar, which I had experienced during training course (generously) named Leading the Intercultural Dialogue in our Projects for Better Acceptance of Diversity in Society. I don’t try recall too much the long, long bus journey, but everything that happened later I do and I will many times more. We were accomodated in a very nice youth hostel in calm suburbs – not far away from the city centre, so we didn’t get distracted, but in the free time we were still able to do some sightseeing. I feel really blessed though with the amazing people I’ve met. There were many great participants, I could spend with them a lot more nights talking and I hope that with some of them I will start cooperation on any future projects. We really touched each other’s hearts and cultures. Organizators were also really amazing, wise and skilled people, who knew importance of team building activities and in the first day successfully chose ones that effectively made us know, who is who. I loved the most the interview, because at first there were just easy basic questions like name and your NGO, but then we got really deep in “in ten years I will be” or “the most amazing thing I’ve ever done”. We got from this simple game topics for conversations for whole week. The next day we got really engaged in a sort of creative task: designing a magazine cover. Sounds fun, but our awesome organizators managed to connect it with refugee and ethnicity problems in our country so it was also a great tool for the topic. We were very proud of our magazine called Fear; it described mostly our xenofobic propaganda in Czechia. We were later also practising presentation and in following days we did few tasks-experiments which helped us understand how excluded people, migrants or refugees feel and how poor possibilities they have. I appreciate that since understanding is always the first step to take. The most valuable for me though was the day when we have learned about how conflicts work and how not to let them escalate, which is very useful information not only for leading ICD, but also for everyday life. This would be already absolutely great experience, but we also found time somehow to diagnose ourselves and find out our prefferences in conflicts and leading skills and we even went through all important documents on human rights. Great part of the project all time through was having a learning buddy, who was motivating you all the time and who shared with you his/her learning experinece as well. For me it was definitely one of the best projects I’ve ever been to and I am looking forward to come back to Zadar and also meet my new-found friends again.
Katarzyna Gattnar
