More than Hope – Or – When We Began To Walk Together
2Village Black Forest, SOS Children Village
In 2016 we started a longterm exchange project for teenagers living in out-of-home-care between SOS Children Village Black Forest and SOS-Children Village Megadim (Migdal HaEmek) and Neradim (Arad).
Main consideration/idea was: There are no good practices existing for kids coming from poorly educated parental homes to learn sustainable from very different cultures, especially Germany and Israel. Including SOS Palestine (Bethlehem) is projected in 2019.
We know that we need additional dimensions to cognition, we need dimensions that touches the teenagers in an emotional and effective way to keep all that what they can learn in their mind (life experience) and it must be a kind of learning that bring them a huge step forward in their own development.
Targets for the project are
- Growth of Intercultural competences
- Support of identity development
- Enrichment of the knowledge of the past/history
- Ensuring of learning democracy and participation
First: We found formats for the additional dimension in music, dance and sport. What we do together is: doing workshops about culture, history, biography, dancing together, making music, cooking, eating together, getting to know typical rituals for the specific culture, visit for the respective culture important places. Second: important to go into the world of the other to see and to feel their living world. We`ve gosupport by Israel Philharmonic Orchetra, SWR Syphnic Orchestra, Israelian counter tenor, Israelian and German Dancers, German film team. Third: Talk about it! This winter 2019/2020, we are planning two public presentations of our project, one in Tel Aviv and one in Freiburg (film, dance, music). For 2020/2021 we are planning an event with all three SOS-Organisations in our "Embassy for Children" in Berlin.
This way to give oppotunity to a very special life experience is not always easy. But, what we learned since 2016: It works!