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Recap One World Week 4 ALL
During the One World Week 2016 we invited refugees to come over and join several events, this made it the real first One World Week for ALL! It was a success, as both the students and staff of our University and the refugees told me with great enthusiasm how much they enjoyed it!
Spread over 4 days we had about 50 people from from the University (students and staff) actively involved and about 40 refugee-comrades coming over.
On Thursday we went all together to the culture & fashion shows & Indonesian dance performance in Orion and most of us participated in the workshop “Traditional Dutch Master-painters” (credits to the organisers from SSR-W).
On Friday evening we joined a completely different event: The One World Olympic! An annual sport competition organised by Thymos, in which teams of all different nationalities participate. Our refugee comrades were welcomed in a mixed team, with mostly Italian and Dutch students.
Saturday we had our own event organised for the One World Week (for ALL): The Typical Wageningen Market & Kitchen Experience. More than 20 refugees of all ages came over and enjoyed this day with the students and employees of our university. Claudia told me afterwards: “It was very nice to be able to share some time with the refugees, the point of view that I liked the most it was that we just had a normal day together. something that probably has not been so frequent in their life recently. We were able to share our spare time, irrespectively from our cultural origin/nationality or last experiences. Like hanging out with friend, especially in the afternoon, when cooking and eating together!! I have appreciated that, and I am sure that they did as well. Thank you for organising such an amazing event.”
Now, the Italian couple, Alberto & Marta are still in contact with the couple from Afghanistan that they hosted this day. They told me the couple, which belong to the Sikh religion, came by bike from Ede to visit them again. They made pizza together and connected real well. Alberto is also extremely impressed by the Afghanees food they made together the first day. Moreover, the Catalan Toni Clariana told me “I learned a lot about their strength and optimism regardless of the difficult situation that they are going through.”
Sunday we went to the Language café and Exchange market at THUIS in the centre of Wageningen. We exchanged many expressions in different languages including: Dari, Arab, Spanish and Dutch. After a while we realized how sunny it was and went for a walk passing the historical centre, the park and city-wall of Wageningen. On the way we continued sharing lovely words from our own languages.