It’s been a full day dedicated to the event’s of tomorrow: the open day for the public of San Miguel and UWC, and more importantly for the family and friends of the participants. I believe it will be an important day, if not the most important day of the course, as it ties everything we have been doing together, in a way that must be presentable to people that live outside of our little bubble. Because just as Atlantic College, life has felt like a bubble. We have been in three places, mainly: at the facilities, in our house in San Miguel, or at the range with the participants. Luckily we were able to escape for nightly strolls and adventures after all the work was finished once in a while. Go for a coffee, ice scream or some salsa dancing and karaoke in town. If we were willing to sacrifice sleep. But a very important difference for me was that I learned huge amounts about the country I am in, we focussed on what we can do out there and many of the participants will actually go and do it. Create that social change.
I am having very mixed feelings about the end of this project. Again saying goodbye to some of my close friends and people I have spend so many hours with, learned from, stimulated me, and have brought tears to my eyes. I cannot look back on life the past five weeks without a heart filled with gratitude. However, I am also more thrilled than ever for live to go on and move to my next phase in life: university. As I was reflecting during one of our family meetings (both participant and facilitator reflect during these half an hour meetings to discuss the course of the day), I realized that I had been putting off being in the community I am from, with a fear of loosing who I have become the past two years at Atlantic College. The participants will have a challenge too when arriving back home - their mindsets have changed unlike to those of the people around them. To truly put your passion and connection with those in need of improvement into action in an environment that might not support that action is a huge challenge, but I have a lot of faith in them, as long as they really want it. For me, the course has made me less scared to act, act with a critical and reflective mind. Of course I still have to proof this to myself but I am looking forward to it with an open mind. Tomorrow will be an opportunity for the participants to demonstrate their changes and make people understand them, before returning to their home lives. As one of the participants told me, she hoped for her parents to come as they seemed to have lost faith in the existence of people who help others unselfishly. She hopes to bring back this belief to her parents. She definitely brought me this belief.
A lot of powerpoint presentations were prepared, many speeches practiced and a lot of songs sang. With the participants we are performing a poem, that consists of many haikus (a japanese poetic structure of a line with 5 syllables, a middle line of 7 syllables and a line with 5 syllables.) Every language has two of these dedicated to them, and together they form a long poem, with the team of Hope and Passion in our country. Having a lack of access to the entire poem, I will just post the two haikus written in Dutch:
Het scheelt ons wel wat
er gebeurd, medeleven
vind je nu en dan
de capaciteit
het is er, het kan, er is
passie maar passief
(if you’re really curious google translate at your service)
Another participant performs two of her personally written poems, visualized with simple, but very powerful body language. There are some songs, some skits, some wonderful contributions.
There is one song that has stuck in my head since the participants performed it during the auditions, with cool guitars with 8 strings from the area of Veracruz. It’s stuck in my head during the many crazy photos that we took. (During the facilitator photo there were about 30 of the participants with each a camera swarming around us - we felt like celebrities. Undeserved attention). It’s been playing in my head while we went to grab a coffee on the way back. It’s been there while I wrote this blog. And it will be there when I start packing as soon as I have updated my last blog entry. It’s a catchy song, called Bamba (you will recognize it as soon as you hear it). But it’s mainly stuck in my head due to one of the phrases, as they adapted the lyrics to the project.
¡Vamos Cambia! (¡unidos!)
Laura Brouwer - Netherlands (AC '09-'11)
No comments:
Post a Comment