Май в Shokkin Group проходил с упором на театр. Почти две недели у нас гостил молодой актер из Украины, Анатолий, который предлогал мастер-классы, проводил уроки актерского мастерства, публичного выступления и многое другое. Но нетолько мы пользовались знаниями Анатолия, но и тоже отдавали свои знания и передавали опыт. Мы предложили Анатолию посмотреть новый молодежный центр, пообщаться с работниками нашего национального агенства “Euroopa Noored”, рассказали как писать проекты, как мы работаем с русскоязычной молодежью, показали ему нашу прекрасную столицу, а также приобщили к занятиям по сальса. Данный проект был задуман еще прошлым летом и был поддержан Эстонским бюро “Молодежь Европы” и программой Youth In Action.
На последок Анатолий написал небольшой пост о своих впечатлениях:
Sometimes it is just impossible to deny the importance of a well-structured plan. It’s like when you are going for fishing, but forget to take all the equipment. That’s why the program for a job shadowing “We plan to Act!” between Estonia and Ukraine has been prepared weeks before the beginning of a project.
A short 24 hours trip from Kiyv to Tallinn began with a slight nervousness. It is obvious to leave somewhere far, a place where you have never been before and expect that something will go wrong. Most of people consider situations without *going wrong moment* boring. This is exactly one of these cases. No drama, no unnecessary fuss, everything is in order, just like in a drugstore.
My Estonian partners warned me that the weather in Estonia is always unexpected. So I could anticipate anything within 8 and 35 degrees C. I am used to prepare myself for the worst, while hoping for the best, that’s why majority of stuff I took was meant to serve me when it’s cold outside. Upon arrival to Tallinn I was welcomed with a great surprise – 33 degrees above 0. I thought that I came to London or something, as for so many years in a row my teacher of English tried to impose this idea that people talk about the weather more than anything else only in the capital of Great Britain. Now I have a living example as an opposite argument.
When you are travelling to other countries every now and then, at some point you begin to compare the similarities and differences between different nations, even if they have nothing in common. But it’s just a delusion. I would have never thought that I might be welcomed in Estonia as in Armenia. The thing is that I have decided and managed to catch a bus, which arrives to Estonia 5 hours before my original time of arriving. My partner from a hosting NGO, Pavel, turned out to be busy at that time. However this detail didn’t influence my arriving experience a single bit. Pavel organized a warm welcome with the help of Shokkin Group’s members, who not only provided me with everything needed for making me feel comfortable from the very beginning, but organized a short excursions through Tallinn’s old part of the town. This is how my great job shadowing adventure began.
The whole project promised to be intense. Workshops, trainings, excursions, dancing classes and a nice final move with a video shooting, what else would you want to get from an outstanding project? In my head I named the time I was about to spend “paradise”. I was fully ready to share all I had in my head and heart with it. Though working with school kids might be sometimes over-whelming – my experience in this field didn’t let me down a single time. I managed to find a common language with every age group I worked with. What’s interesting is that I managed to do this every time pretty fast. Now I can give a few tips to someone, who’s a newbie in this. An important thing is to provoke kids to become active from the very beginning in order to keep their concentration on you for the rest of the activity. How can you do that? There are 2 things: first of all – ask them an interesting question and let as many kids as possible speak. I have tried both ways – with and without a direct question to them, and the first way is working much better. Second of all – jokes. It may sound simple and obvious in the beginning, but once you start noticing that a sense of humor of kids is not only different, but not that easy to understand and stick to either. That was one of the very important learning moments for me from the very beginning.
As my partners and I were working with different age groups – we couldn’t count that participants in each of them will be able to understand what we actually want from them. As a result we prepared different activities for each age group. Acting activities were suggested to the youngest participants and improvisation and public speaking activities were conducted with teens. The main idea was to let every young person to express and try to explore themselves a little more than usually. Previous Youth in Actions projects, where I was learning and experiencing non-formal methods and methodology in general, helped me to make sure that the activities were as involving and interesting for kids as possible. I don’t want to boast of it, however have to admit – kids were just delighted with time we spent together and there wasn’t a single group that hasn’t asked when we are going to come back to them.
While being a curious and helping job shadower, I have experienced something completely new in my life – I was invited to be a member of a jury on a local theatre festival. Can’t lie – that was really unexpected and my ego just couldn’t let me to decline this proposal. All in all the youngest kids of the different schools really impressed me with their plays and passion. Relative passion, of course.
My home country Ukraine is not a part of EU yet. That’s why we don’t have a national agency and I had no idea what these agencies are dealing with and what processes are going on there. A local Estonian NA representatives kindly agreed to have us for a short dialogue about the things mentioned above. It was really informative and productive meeting with them and it helped to create an idea what Ukraine is missing right now. Hopefully I will be one of the people who will bring my Motherland at least 1 step closer to EU.
At last, but not the least, the time to shoot our final video came. Students who were interested in our activities the most had a possibility to make a contribution to this process. Actually, they were the once who did almost everything for this video to appear. My partners and I tried to stay in the positions of the facilitators as much as we could. This really let some of the guys to open themselves and try something they haven’t done before. I figured that it’s much more pleasant to observe, than when you just try to impose anything to kids and make them memorize what you want.
All in all, I feel really sad leaving this place now. People and place made me feel like home in Estonia and I wish I could stay longer. What’s important is that now I am motivated and full of energy, like never before. I am willing to act and continue my adventure through this life on the way to a great future.
