Boyd Noorda on Thu, 25 May 2000 07:00:11 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> [Balkansunflower-list] BSF Update 22 |
UPDATE 22 Balkans Sunflowers has grown very rapidly in just one year, thanks to more than 350 people who have been involved on field work and thousands of long- distance supporters. Our projects are approaching a phase of maturity - shifting from the emergency actions typical of the first post-war period to what had been our longer-term goal from the beginning: supporting local community building. We are preparing a major fundraising campaign to support the projects that have multiplied very quickly in our areas of operation. The decision to prepare a specific "package", which is being designed in these days, is one of the results of the meeting of the international coordinators in Peja - Kosovo (24-30 April). You can already buy our new t-shirts with Sunflowers design on them: Marko, Wam and the team in Macedonia are taking care of this. Write to the BSF-MK office at macsunfl@freemail.org.mk to order one. We need the cooperation of all our friends and supporters more than ever: core money for everyday expenses will always be needed, and we'll still be faced with the problem that this part is not covered by project-specific grants (which are needed too, anyway, therefore we also welcome any help to establish contacts with donor institutions which can support our initiatives). Balkan Sunflowers will always need creative ways to raise funds at grassroots levels. Besides, it's a way for all our friends who cannot do field work in the Balkans to stay close to us. Another important decision taken at the Peje meeting was to move the central office to the "zone of action". Skopje was chosen as the most suitable location. A larger office space is being sought for this purpose. MACEDONIA Please note that while funding has been secured for BSF activities in Macedonia for these summer months, there will be need of new resources by October. This means that we must start searching for them now. Go to the sections on "how to help", "donations", "how to get involved", and give us a hand while there is time to plan comfortably! The Skopje office also let us know that they will need new volunteers soon, so anybody interested please refer to the volunteers pages on the websites and then contact the relevant people (you'll find addresses and all necessary info on the website). In Macedonia, the team which has worked with the Rom community in Shutka Is now expanding to new neighborhoods and broadening the spectre of activities it offers, mostly to children and young people. Education is often a luxury in these illegal settlements and there's plenty of kids who don't attend school at all, so English classes or theatre activities are much more important than it could appear at first sight. The transfer of BSF activities to the new community centre built by the American Refugee Committee (ARC) has been completed. The centre is called "ROS" which means light. For the moment we keep the same time schedule for the classes. We are going on with the English classes, while theatre classes are held every day by local volunteers. They are working on a new play "Snow-white". There are also computer classes now, and kindergarten. Another project is devoted to street children: it includes music classes and games. English classes are held also on an individual basis: one group of children gets lessons at their houses, several other individual lessons are given and a class for adults has been started at L' Esperance, another Roma NGO. The music CD Project has been followed by one US volunteer together with one local employee. Day Field trips with Roma children are organized occasionally. Sport classes "restarted": probably we will soon hold them every day. Children activities are being brought to new neighbourhoods:Klanica, Aerodrom and Momin Potok. There is one BSF volunteer taking care of this action together with local volunteers. The ARC had asked BSF to teach English also in their community centre in Kumanovo, to attract more people there. Two volunteers have now started to teach beginner-level lessons twice a week there. KOSOV@ BSF is running projects in four main locations - Pristina, Peje, Gjakova and Gijlane - and shifting its focus from emergency response to long-term, sustainable community development. Since environmental issues are rather pressing in Kosovo (garbage in particular has become a heavy problem in the cities), working on issues like cleaning and improving parks and urban environments provides a good basis for bringing a local community together: several actions of this type have been started/conducted by Balkan Sunflowers in different locations around the country. A good opportunity for all BSF coordinators to experiment this situation first-hand (the model could now be reproduced in other fields of operation) was the Gjakova Clean- Up day on Saturday, April 29th. The overall project was planned as a 6-week operation, Clean-ups every Saturday, from Earth Day (April) 22nd April to the UN World Environmental Day (June 5th). This time volunteers from the projects in Peja, Gjakova and Gijlan (about thirty BSF people ) joined with the participants of the international coordinators' meeting and local people, above all kids: they all worked together from 9 to 5 to pick up trash from streets/sidewalks/grassfields (more info in the Gjakova section). BSF is promoting environmental actions (in a broader sense of the word) across Kosov@, as you'll read in the following. More volunteers are needed rapidly for Gjakova and Gjilan, to maintain the current programs. Peje has enough volunteers for the existing programs but is putting together a summer camp program that will need a few more in June. PRISTINA We have helped organize cleanups of two large residential complexes, where more than 10,000 people live (the trash problem is coming back again and again; the need of cleaning becomes urgent when it gets warmer and there's growing risk of diseases). We are working with residents' committees that are taking on new functions to help improve their quality of life, and we enjoy a very good cooperation with them and with KFOR and UNMIK. We got a good press coverage including a fair amount of Balkan Sunflowers airtime on RTK television. Another project envisages the construction of a playground in the Bregu I Diellit (Sunny Hill) area in cooperation with War Child, to be installed in May-June 2000. PEJA Former UCK fighters today help the children plant flowers and potatoes in Peja's Peace Garden on the land provided by a primary school: this is one of the most recent BSF-Peja projects, that should evolve in a center of activities and part of a summer camp for local children that will extend through most of the summer. Activities there include preparing the field for planting flowers and vegetables, watering the garden, and also the artistic part: the children painted signs with names and pictures of vegetables/flowers; the signs were then put around the garden to indicate what has been planted where. A greenhouse is being planned too. Integrating different levels of local community (school children, local workers, many of them former fighters), is an important goal behind a very simple activity. Art and environmental awareness are the basis for several successful BSF activities in Peje, besides the basic animation work in collective centres like the Konvikt (started already last summer), blind school and kids' hospital. Although the Arts centre activities are temporarily suspended because the theatre is being renovated, the other projects are in full blossom. The Parks Project, funded by UNICEF and UNMIK (clean up, restoration, new park benches and tables, tools, playgrounds, other repairs), IRC and IOM (labor, electrification and other repairs), has been extended into the spring with an aim to start a slow peace building process via social contacts with internationals during the work. A special celebration was held on April the first to mark the restoration of Karagac Park: picnic, music, readings, environmental video debut and more. An offspring of the Parks Project is the Urban Environment Awareness Campaign, which includes the environmental art project (funding from IRC), education in the schools, signs, posters, trash bins for the whole city of Peja. The video program that was part of this package received funding from UNICEF to produce environmental films with teenagers. This is developing into a special youth video center in the middle of Peja. A room to host the project is being renovated by IRC in the Peje Youth Centre. Following up the success of the photo workgroup in Pakrac (Croatia) during the social reconstruction project there (1993-1997), plans are being made to start a similar photo project now in Peja. The volunteer who coordinated the photo project in Pakrac is now in Peja. The cinema nights are continuing (a the video projector had been donated through efforts of Danny the clown): after showing the first film in the cinema for local people in many years, the shows have been brought to Karagac Park, in the open air. GJAKOVA The already mentioned city clean-up action mobilized enormous resources in the city including Italian KFOR, NGOs, and the municipal services. "Just Clean It" - as the action was called - was a really big operation, and it had many important aspects: from the cooperation with the newly created Youth Council (BSF helped here too, supporting the election process in The city schools with specific training), to the massive funds and materials obtained as donations not only from 18 international organizations, but from 125 local businesses as well. The BSF Gjakova team performed brilliantly in the role of organizer/manager of the whole action, which started as an idea of Earth Day Celebration but will continue to develop across the summer. One of the best results was the response of the local community after the first clean-up weekend. Today Gjakova is probably the cleanest town in Kosov@. A community Spring Festival has been organized in Freedom Park to celebrate the action, with singing, dancing, music, poetry recitals, athletic events, and silly games. The basic activities that BSF has been carrying out in Gjakova since last summer are in the meanwhile continuing. Three days a week, BSF volunteers organize activities at the Brickworks transit camp. These activities, geared mainly to the children, include drawing, art competitions, football, singing, creative play etc. We have also started bi-weekly English lessons for the older boys and girls. Due to the sensitivity of some of the traditional families of the camp, female volunteers teach the girls, males teach the boys. The Brickworks canteen has been refurbished, with new windows, new carpet, shelving, new locks on doors, new lighting, mural, so that it can be used as a warm safe place for children to play, and as a central meeting place for women of the camp. There are two other transit camps where we perform activities with the kids, the Kindergarten (here BSF also liaises between the managers of the camp, Solidarite, and the residents of the camp) and the Slovenian Village. We visit the Childrens ward at the Gjakova hospital two days a week for activities with the children. There is a children's room where Balkan Sunflowers can hold the activities. Projects under development include: a Youth Center (working with the municipality to find premises for free for a Youth Center,), with the support of the local youth groups, and * student councils; Art for Prisoners (UNMIK is planning to send packages to each of the * prisoners from Gjakova in Serbia. BSF suggested that we organize for 400 drawings, by the children of Gjakova, to be presented as part of the package); Environmental Awareness Art Competition (for the schools: the winning selection will be exhibited in the Cultural Center and displayed in the Municipality Building; they could also be used as designs for posters in * later environmental campaigns). This project still needs financing. GJILAN BSF volunteers are continuing children activities in the Konvikt refugee centre, where they are also hosted: an accommodation that enables them to live in close contact with the assisted families, but also places them under some stress for lack of privacy. There are about 100 children in this refugee center serving Albanian refugees from Presheva (Serbia), working with IRC. Another IRC refugee facility, Gosha Center, is also served by BSF volunteers who provide children's educational and recreational activities for 30 kids. We have performed distributions of schoolbags, school materials and clothes, and also jumpers, jackets and shoes from Kosova Red Cross. Thanks to actions of BSF activists for the first time there is now regular medical treatment organized in the both transit centers. Later on, in March, we started activities for children at a third IRC facility, the Kindergarten Center. Preschool: for ages 3 and below at Konvikt Center, with resident mothers and their children. To provide support for children and meeting area for mothers. Registered with UNICEF. Internet training: one hour per day for children from Konvikt , Gosha, and Kindergarten, with IOM. Support learning to communicate by email. Eggs: sourced commitment of 600eggs/ week every Tuesday for Konvikt centre, with possibly more eggs for other centres soon. With World Vision. Agricultural Project: a private farmer donated 400 m2 of fertile active farmland for a kids' farm, to learn and produce food for their families. Involves Konvikt men and young adults from farms to help guide the kids. Ferizaj Transit Centres: we have been asked to work in 5 refugee camps, for Preshevo refugees (approx 600 people) in the Ferizaj (Urosevac) area. Developing this new district from Gjilan base. Pathfinding. Playgrounds: seeking funding to design and supervise the installation of 5-7 playgrounds in the Gjilan, Ferizaj, Kacanik and Vitina areas. ALBANIA The team who worked in Albania in the last few months also deserves a special mention, since they went through a particularly tough period, on the emotional side too. As you know from previous updates, the difficulty in getting funds for Albanian projects forced BSF to suspend most of them: it was a very painful decision, especially for the people who had got personally very involved and developed strong ties with the communities they worked with. Staying in Albania to help there, while most international aid followed the refugees back to Kosovo, was a right decision but it was also a difficult situation to face without previous preparation. This is why the group of long-term volunteers who saw it through during the hardest part is now taking time to make plans very carefully about the way to restart. The Mine and Weapons Awareness Campaign was the only one who had received a specific grant - from UNICEF - and it turned out to be a big success. UNICEF was interested in continuing the experience (actually, there should be still some funding from the first phase, since a six-month action was planned, but we are waiting to see whether the three remaining months will be covered). The core team of long- term volunteers who worked in Albania were particularly sorry to leave Bathore, an extremely poor and degraded periphery of Tirana, where BSF managed to bring about dramatic changes with very little resources (you can find more materials on the Bathore projects, photos included, on our website). There is a possibility to organize a second phase of the MAWA campaign for Bathore, while seeking more funds for further actions in favour of that community. The children of Bathore are particular vulnerable to the situation of extreme poverty and social decay of their environment, but also very responsive to the efforts of the volunteers: they showed a noticeable improvement ("turned from wild animals into kids", in the words of a BSF volunteer who came to love them very much) in just a few weeks. Therefore, the motivations to resume work there are very strong. The Mine and Weapons Awareness Campaign is not a simple information action on technicalities concerning the weapons that abound in Albania: it is a complex program designed to educate the kids to recognize the damages of a culture based on violence, and also to teach them to express their feelings and ideas in a creative, non-conflict way. The first phase started in January, with a first training session for 10 local and 5 international volunteer. Then, the MAWA program was conducted in several schools. Each program was concluded with an evaluation week. It affected not only the children directly involved in the program, but also much bigger circles of local people (reached out to local communities through children's parents, schoolmates, and friends). We felt it was a success beyond expectations. The program: through play theater, music, arts, the goal was to create a platform where youngster could express the effect of mines and weapons on the children's minds and lives. The children came from a "dictator-like" schooling system and learned to express themselves openly through activities conducted by the BSF team. At the end of April a big cultural event in Tirana (sponsored by UNICEF) concluded the first MAWA Campaign tour: kids from the schools where BSF conducted MAWA activities came to Tirana to present a theatre play on-stage . They marched on the streets of Tirana singing songs. Posters and T-shirts were made and distributed. It was thrilling to see "our" kids standing in front of a big audience speaking about how they want to live their future lives in peace. UNICEF was very enthusiastic about the entire program, an warmly accepted the report on the action. They now have to give an answer on our proposal to continue the program. ---------------------------------------------------------------- News from the | To unsubscribe: Send an E-mail to: Balkan Sunflowers | majordomo@ddh.nl and put in the text body: (the new SunCokret) | unsubscribe balkansunflower-list ---------------------------------------------------------------- More on the project: http://www.ddh.nl/org/balkansunflower # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net