Sponsor Bosnian-Herzegovinian youth to build peace

Hello all! We at CIM hope you had a wonderful summer! The summer of 2016 has been extremely busy, but extremely fun and successful for the Center for Peacebuilding! In August the Center hosted our annual Peace Camp for Bosnian and Herzegovinian youth! We had 30 youth from all over the country come to CIM’s Garden of Opportunity to learn peace-building skills! We also hosted our first Peace Caravan! We hosted panels on peace building all over Bosnia and Herzegovina with participants! It has been a very busy summer, but a very successful and exciting one! 

CIM hosted young people from all over Bosnia and Herzegovina, from different backgrounds, for a 7-day peace camp! At the camp the young people learned peace building skills as well as lessons in healing and reconciliation. The young people also learned how to be peace builders in their own communities, with trainings in how to host peace building activities on their own. It was hosted at CIM’s Garden of Opportunities and was a great success for the future of peace building!

Peace Camp Activities

1. Council: This activity involved participants learning how to speak openly and listening to each other with no judgment or interruption.
2. Dialogues: This activity involved participants learning how they could influence their communities towards peace building.
3. Identity Workshops: This activity focused on participants recognizing their own identities, and how to work with them.
4. Round Table: The theme of this round table was “Why young people are leaving Bosnia and Herzegovina and what young people can do about it”

After finishing CIM’s Peace Camp participants travelled throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina on CIM’s Peace Caravan for six days. On the Peace Caravan participants hosted panel discussions in 6 different cities throughout the country. The theme of the panel discussions was “What youth can do to work towards peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina”. These panel discussions were held in Sanski Most, Glamoc, Sarajevo, Mostar, Milici and Doboj. Throughout the Caravan participants were able to learn about the history and culture of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Sarajevo participants got to be a part of the Omladinski Film Festival, while in Doboj and Mostar participants got to explore historical ruins. The panels in all the cities were highly successful and sparked important discussions about peace building in Bosnia and Herzegovina. CIM’s first every Peace Caravan was a great success!

Peace and Love,

The CIM Team

Links:

• To read more about our camp/caravan check out our site!

Our final Peace Camp activites have concluded in November 2015. This year's peace camp have again attracted wonderful and motivated participants from all over Bosnia.

After the end of the week, the participants went home to implement community peacebuilding activities.

Most activities included tours to local religious and historical sites, meetings with religious leaders at these religious sites, visits with youth organizations in the various regions, trips to museums, and time for socializing and discussion. Workshops with a focus on younger participants focused primarily on addressing stereotypes and ways to approach peace building activism. Participants in Mostar, after visits to local religious sites and an extensive discussion on their learnings, distributed leaflets through town with messages of peace.
In total they have organised 9 community events, and as a result they were able to reach out to 100 more people in their own towns and cities (Mostar, Travnik, Gornji Rahic in Brcko District, Buzim and Prijedor, Banja Luka in partnership with Helsinki Citizen’s Foundation, Kresevo and Visoko).

The participants also wrote stories of what Peace Camp has meant to them and we wanted to share one with you.

It was a very great honor for me to participate in this peace camp and to get to meet such nice people that I got to spend 7 days with. Those 7 days were great fun for me and I learned a lot. I learned how we all, regardless of how much we try, have prejudices about other people, but also how to minimize those prejudices. I learned how to be different and equal. I learned a lot about different religions. Religions that are and are not so familiar to me. The most important thing is that I learned something new about myself. I learned how to look at the world in a new way and to accept things the way they are, and try to be a better person. I thought about things that I didn’t think I was capable of talking about. And I felt relief. In these 7 days,  there were many smiles and tears, joy and frustration. And those feelings united us and made us into one. In one word, it was extraordinary. Thank you for that, Amra

Hope you will have wonderful holidays, and a winter full of joy and kindness.

Best wishes from Sanski Most,

Adelina and the CIM Team