Art and culture

Peace Messengers Online Course

The project took place in:

Online

Training

Written by Lili Stepchenko

January 2021

My journey to Peace topic started between the years 2020 and 2021. I participated in an online seminar called SCI Peace Messengers, from the 16th of December till the 13th of January. To dive deeper into the topic and to learn how to be a Peace Messenger, I met every Wednesday evening with our facilitators and other participants on the platform Zoom, where we with the help of non-formal educational methods learned the topic, exchanged our points of view and got to learn each other. Also, we had creative home tasks which we fulfilled with the partner and we had guests who shared with us about their work in the field of peace, like International Peace Work and Art and Peace.

I would admit though the program was not that highly intensive, all participants were actively involved and I find the project itself useful, full of activities that I can personally use in my future work with peace topic. Also, I would like to thank our two trainers, Wilbert and Florida, for being always in touch and who supported us while we were doing our tasks. Thank you for the well-planned online sessions with lots of funny energizers that we did together. Furthermore, I find meetings with our invited speakers very inspiring. We had Lukasz Firla, who is a Program support coordinator of the Iraqi Kurdistan team of Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), Sergio Raimundo, who is a staff member of SCI Belgium, which had a project about pacifism, art, and action and Merlijn Twaalfhoven, who is a Dutch composer, and went among others several times to the Middle East to introduce music as a tool to bring people together. All three speakers had interesting input and workshops. One more time my big gratitude to all who took part in the Peace Messengers seminar and helped me to take a closer step towards a world of peace, social justice, and sustainable development, where all people live together with mutual respect and without recourse to any form of violence to solve conflicts.