During this week in Rustavi Scouts Centre we discovered the topics of radicalization, extremism and what to do to prevent them from taking over our society. It was an amazingly thorough training course full of practical exercises as well as creating educational escape rooms to raise awareness on social problems connected to radicalization.
We were educated by wonderful trainers Pavel, Ucha and Filip, who enabled us to build escape rooms on the topics of bullying, social exclusion and violent extremism. We had a budget of 50 euros, one or two rooms per group and 2 days to come up with a story, a bunch of puzzles and to make everything work. Although it sounded like mission impossible, we actually managed to create very cool rooms, with elaborate stories and some pretty badass puzzles. This just goes to show that we are capable of much more than we think.
Before we started building our own rooms, we visited IQB escape room in Tbilisi, had an abundant Georgian dinner and plenty of team-building to ensure all participants found people with similar mindsets. We explored the topic of radicalization, found out what causes it and how to prevent it. We debated whether all social change needs radical ideas and action and worked on our critical thinking skills. We also created an escape room in half an hour (!), which was a challenging but still doable task.
The end of the project was marked by the open event, where locals came to test our rooms. Some of them had never played an escape room before, while some were professionals. Everybody left happy and we still got to test the other rooms that were created. The last night was celebrated by a Georgian dinner and silent disco, which was a very cool partying concept – no noise, all sound comes from headphones, plus there is no conflicts, because there were two channels to choose music from. With this party mood the project ended, as we left in the middle of the night to go to the airport. We were sent off with loads of hugs and love and ideas for future collaboration. It was a very amazing project/training course. I think we all learnt a lot and exceeded our expectations of what is possible. <3
Maria Kurm
Participant of “Escape Radizalization” TC
and active member of the TYI “Critical Escape”
Photo credits: @Jegor Mljavov