Our Classroom Visits

We have now finished our last day running workshops in schools.  What an amazing experience it has been.  While none of us expected anything short of a moving and rewarding adventure, it’s safe to say we’ve been touched beyond expectations.  

So much hard work and preparation goes in to the workshops we do.  We have practiced amongst ourselves for hours, studied our scripts, and had numerous practice runs in schools back in Nova Scotia.  While we were all confident in our abilities, the success you feel when you can see the impact made on these children reaffirms everything we’ve worked for.

We spent our first day in a slightly different scenario than we had anticipated.  With the guidance from Peaceful Schools International Coordinators, Rick and John, our group facilitated workshops to a team of recreational soccer players.  The youth were all males aged fifteen to seventeen.  Most of our practice and training had revolved around youth considerably younger than this age group, so at first I think we were all somewhat intimidated.   
 

 

 
However, Rick and John are such strong leaders they took the reins, leading a discussion that cut deep into issues of violence, trust, peace, home and personal conflicts.  By mid afternoon our small groups and 1:1 ratio with the youth broke down a lot of the tensions and anxieties.  By the end of the day I think our group and theirs both benefited pretty enormously from the situation.  The arrangement of the day allowed a lot of time for the youth to interact more casually with us as facilitators.  This allowed them the opportunity to ask us about our own experiences as people only a few years older than them. 

 

Wednesday was our first day spent in primary schools.  Our team was divided into two groups, one visiting a local Protestant school and the other a local Catholic school.  My group had the opportunity to visit a school called Wheatfield.  Wheatfield is significant in that it is located in the Ardoyne community in Northern Belfast.  Just down the road from Weathfield is Holy Cross Primary.   

 

Holy Cross was the site of what became known as the Holy Cross dispute, a time of protest where Protestant radicles blocked the front entrance to the school, interrupting Catholic school girls and their families from being able to walk to school.  In the early 2000's the dispute involved the IRA and garnered mainstream media attention from around the world.  It was during this time that Hetty van Gurp, the founder of Peaceful Schools, decided to get involved with the peace project in Belfast. 

 

Thursday, our second day in schools, our whole group traveled to Holy Trinity Primary School.  There, the school’s eccentric and friendly principal welcomed us in.  He happily adorned the SMU sweater given to him as a gift as he proudly toured us around the facilities.  Between workshops each of us had the opportunity to join the students in their playground for recess.  The amount of energy created when 15 playful foreigners from Canada join a group of 150 eager primary school children is not to be overlooked.  Between conga lines, games of tag and discussions about comic books, the atmosphere, although positive and educational, might not easily have been described as peaceful.                

 

At the end of our day visiting Holy Trinity we were invited to join the school in the assembly room to watch a performance they had prepared for us.  There, we were serenaded by the African Drum Club (who could seriously play) and a quick concert.  Rather than a choir group, the entire school sang a couple songs about peace and love while their principal, still wearing his SMU hoodie, accompanied them on piano.  The performance blew us all away, inspiring our own impromptu concert in response.

 

Friday, as our last day in school we travelled to St. Clares Primary School.  St. Clares sits on an interface, a dividing line between Protestant and a Catholic neighborhoods.  This school however, is a Catholic one.  By this point we all felt fairly confident and polished with our workshops.  As the day wound down and the realization that this would soon be over set in, it was a little hard.  So many months of preparation went into this; the time goes by so quick it’s hard to even process everything that happens.  By the end of our last workshops, between our time in schools in Belfast and back in Halifax we estimate that we have reached several hundred youth.  The thought that even a percentage of those kids would truly internalize the messages we teach is pretty incredible.

 

You can learn a lot about something from reading, watching documentaries, asking questions and talking to people, but nothing compares to how it feels to actually go somewhere and see it first hand.  I think we were all a little taken aback by the amount of discrimination that still exists in Belfast.  The ability to feel like you make even the tiniest impact in removing that discrimination makes every bit worth it.  The truth is that this sort of interaction really does work.  The kids really do care.  They listen.  They are young enough that what we teach them now will ultimately mold who they become as people when they’re older.  As foreigners and fun loving people, we are able to entertain them and reach them on a level that otherwise might be unobtainable.  We come to their classrooms with funny accents and talk about the importance of huge concepts like empathy and what they can do to become a good global citizen.  On top of this, the satisfaction we feel from this kind of work will undoubtedly start an addiction in most of our group to continue perusing initiative positive change.  The time in schools has been so overtly positive it’s really hard to even explain.  Throughout those few days I had the chance to connect with students from across the world and with new friends from this program I had just made.  We were able to share true human emotion and to promote something positive.  Feeling that is indescribable.