There is no need to travel the world to make a change

By Rosalie de Kerf

Over the past four weeks I have learned a lot. This does not only mean that I have deepened my understanding of the history, present and potential future of Kosovo. This includes all sorts of things that came with online learning, meetings with Kosovar organisations and the assignments we worked on. The part of Peace Lab that contributed most to my personal learning was the project we had to complete in the last week. We were allowed to either work on this individually or in groups. At the beginning of the intensive, Eline and I decided to work together on this project and we started working on a plan. We decided to create an online magazine in which you would be able to read about the differences of growing up in the Netherlands and Kosovo. This case study would help us compare the youth in a country that has been at peace for a long time, with the youth in a country where the last conflict only ended just over two decades ago.

Working towards this vision, we tried to set up meetings with youth in Kosovo and youth in the Netherlands. As Eline and I are both Dutch, the latter was not much of a problem. Finding people to interview in Kosovo on the other hand, was a completely different story. We sent follow-up emails to many people we had met during our Peace Lab classes and started to email student associations of the universities in Kosovo. Not much happened which is when we decided to move our search to a platform that is a bit more modern than email, we started Facebook messaging people. This turned out to be a great success and many of the people we sent a message to also replied. This is when we learned that students in Kosovo often find themselves not proficient enough to give an interview in English. They speak Albanian or Serbian in school and do not speak English too often. Luckily, we did find some people that were willing to answer our questions using Google Translate, and some who were actually willing to do a Zoom/Skype (online) interview. The fact that it is easier to reach out to people from my own generation on Facebook than on email was one of the first lessons I learned during this project.

Once we got to the interviews, many interesting things happened and a lot of stories were shared. From the beginning, Eline and I tried to shift away from conventional interviewing by telling our own stories too. This made for very interesting conversations rather than true interviews. For me personally, one of the most surprising things here was the fact that it turns out you can truly connect with someone during an online interview. We spoke to people whom we had never talked to before as we met them on Facebook. Even though we did not know each other, it was fairly easy to connect and open up about personal issues.

One of the interviews we had with a Kosovo student was with Advan Syla. A girl who had told me her English was not good enough for an interview referred me to someone she knew would be interested, Advan. During this interview, Advan said something that inspired me. He told us that in his future he would like to “make a change, because it is kind of useless if you were born here and raised here and in the end just go out and put all your effort somewhere else.” He was talking about making a change in Kosovo, the country in which he was born and raised. 

All my life, I have been thinking I would go and make a change in other parts of the world. Then, when he said this, I realised that there is no need to travel the world to make a change. Our other interviews had already shown that there is still reason to believe that the Netherlands could improve the stability of its peace. This made me think about my own future and the things that I might want to do after I graduate from AUC. What Advan told us made sense: Why run off and help a society you do not know very much about if your own society needs people too. Of course, the situation in the Netherlands is completely different than in Kosovo. Still, I do not think there is no room for change here. We will see what happens, but just like this statement by Advan, many of the other interviews also made me question my personal judgements and perspectives. 

So, not only did I learn a lot about Kosovo during this intensive, also about myself and for this I would truly like to thank Anne, Eline and all our interviewees (Diellza Azemi, Gresa Ferri, Anel Hasic, Gerben Koopman, Aleksandra Lazarevic, Velard Paqarizi, Alketa Rrahmani, Petrit Selimi, Advan Syla, Lidewij van der Vaart, Mustafa Yildiz, and Lieke de Zwart).

Have a nice summer!