Hi everyone
You have all finished your experience in the Connect Program now, I hope it was a valuable experience for all of you. Could you please post your final reflections as a response to this post - try to express the most important things you learnt, give concrete examples, and explore whether you have in some way changed through this! Also let me know about your English ... has it improved??
Can I remind you that to get your final marks you have to write a reflective paper (if you haven't already done so) on the experience - of course you can use your diaries to help you write this. Please send it to me by email.
Could you also complete this post-survey for me (and you will also have to do a different one for Soliya) - I'm sorry you have to do all of these questionnaires - it's for research purposes and also to improve future exchanges.
We will have a final meeting to discuss the project - I'll send you a mail about it.
Francesca
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AS A CONVERSATION CAN CHANGE THE WAY YOU THINK
RispondiEliminaMy group was composed of two Americans from Ohio, three Jordanians, three Egyptians and two Europeans, but three of them left us during the program because they had problem with university.
The first session was a little bit embarrassing because we had some difficulties to talk with each other. It didn’t depended from the difference between civilization, but only from the normal problem that people who doesn’t know each other have, but our facilitators helped us to be less shy. As the meetings went on all of us became less embarrassed and started to talk about every argument.
The fourth week was devoted to speak about the video project. It was the most interesting meeting because we shared our thought on our own made work. All of us spent a lot of time doing this project. I learned how to use windows movie maker and how try to be biased in narrating specific events. I was very proud of myself when Sabreen, one of the Jordanian girl, told to western people that she was surprised by our videos, because she was expected we were all pro-Israel, but we weren't and we were unbiased. The middle eastern were emotional, but I was expected this. I didn’t criticized these way of think, but their videos weren’t unbiased and the two guys didn’t tell us the conflict’s history, but only the suffering of Palestinian people.
During the meetings we use the first part of each one for know better each other. We discussed about our families, our studies, our cities and everything was important to describe ourselves. I loved learn about the Muslim holidays and about the condition of the women in the Middle East, because I didn’t know anything about that. This second topic was very important because know it had change my approach to discussion.
The line that our facilitators have tried to give us during the discussions was try to focusing on the relationship between Western and the predominantly Muslim world.
I learned to respect the importance of religion for the Muslims. They follow the religion teaching in all the moment of their life. This was my thought but when Ayman, an Egyptian guy, he tell us that Allah teach him everything he needs I was shocked because this behavior was very different from mine. My shock wasn’t something bad, but only a surprise to heard from an young guy that religion is so important, because normally in Italy I heard this type of feelings only from old people, like my granny.
We had always kind conversation. We shared our thought always in a polite way and everyone tried to understand the others. Be polite was something to do for understand better each other. And this was what we did during all the project. This way of communication was the better manner for didn’t created misunderstanding and be able to exchange different opinion.
In the final session we tried to give a solution to the problem that afflict our societies: the non respect between different cultures. The solution we proposed was to create a Facebook group where all to people can discuss about these topics. This solution will touch only young people because old people aren’t able to use properly the new technologies. All of us hope for solve the problem in 10 years, but we are aware how difficult will be, because the governments don’t like to cooperate with the others to solve this problem and the media like to instigate the racial hatred.
I was mistrustful of Americans more than Arabs, but Sean and Amy helped me to change my mind about them. They aren’t ignorant like all the Americans I’ve known in my life, and they are humbles for admitted that they didn’t know anything about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I started this project without ideas about what to expect from and after 8 weeks it leave me great feelings and new friends.