Belgium Great-Britain and Greece are buddies

You might have heard from this new project from the EMEA region ; the buddy system. As Belgian NJR’s we thought it would be a really great opportunity to work together with an other JB. We are a small JB and we struggle mostly with finding active JB’ers. Even though we have been improving a lot over the last years we still don’t think that we are functioning in an optimal way so we said yes to the buddy system. We got paired to Great-Britain and Greece (which we think is amazing!).

The first mandate was to create an activity that would be the bridge between the content area of 2017 (Human Rights) and the content area of 2018 (Diversity). We took contact with Greece and Great-Britain and we did agree on an activity quite fast. We wanted to relate it also to each of the countries (Belgium, Great-Britain and Greece). The activity is about a dilemma that happened before in history or mythology and the participants have to make a small play about it and then there comes a debriefing where they have to relate this dilemma of history with something more actual (the migration crisis). And at the end we discussed what we could do to find a sustainable solution to this problem.

It was really great because our participants were so involved and they really took this serious. All of them were really aware of the problem and they feel it’s their duty to do something about it. ( We had a protest march on the 12th of November against the way our government is handling the problem and they all wanted to go, which is so great to hear because this means they are really socially engaged!)

What came up of the activity?

We discovered that our JB’ers are really wanting to take action and change the world. We also felt it was great to know that we wouldn’t be the only ones running this activity but two other countries. As Njr’s we are looking forward to plan the next activity and we really think this cooperation between our three countries can be really good and productive if all of us put as much effort in it.