The Seven Doors Room

This was the fist post on "peace please" blog...

Thirty five young peace activists were destined to meet in Wroclaw (the meeting place). Coming from seven different countries, some of which have major political conflicts, it sounds impossible to find common grounds for dialogue. The funny thing is that was not a problem at all.

Speaking of myself; one random laid-back Egyptian, lying in the bed of my Latvian friend Marcis, listening to the snoring noises of my Armenian friend Zaven, who is supposed to be in the middle of his photography workshop, I feel like talking about Peace.

This is not my first youth exchange, and it wasn’t my first time to tackle the subject of peace with young people from different backgrounds. But what was surprising was the potential! Those people, most of which 3 or 4 years younger than me, showed an amount of creativity during the workshops that made me stop and reconsider my perspective when it comes to the implementation of positive peace among different societies.

In one of the workshops we decided to create a blog, not for meeting up and sharing our memories, but as one step towards the sustainability of the work we did. We need to speak out and have our voice heard AND REPLIED TO. After seeing it in 35 pairs of eyes, I believe it is going to happen.

Imagine a room with seven doors, where someone enters from each door and it closes behind him. Those people know, almost, nothing about one another and they are requested to spend some time together. They are requested to coexist. That is how it was. I believe most of us learnt more about peace not from the workshops but during our free time, our sleeping time, on the dinner table and so on where Ania, the beautiful Polish organizer/ team leader/ moderator was screaming her lungs out on us to respect the rules of the dorm, or talking with the Chef about the different demands of vegetarians, Moslems and allergics.

Now imagine that room when the doors open and everyone goes back to where they came from.

I see hope :)

Hussein

TV room

11.12.09

4:00 pm -4:00 am