Kindness of strangers

By Jet de Vries

"Finally summer!” All my friends, classmates, and pretty much everyone around me is exhaling all the accumulated stress of the intense university year. Even though I can exhale the course stress, on the first of July another kind of stress took hold of me “AUCSA stress”, my board and I are now officially in office and the responsibilities and emails are flooding in. Even though this board year starts now, I have indeed finished my second academic year and it feels pretty surreal. But, what is even more surreal is the intensive month-long course that has just finished. 

Kosovo and its people have made a lasting impact on me, I learned that it takes very little to be kind to strangers, to show genuine interest, and that people that you meet and their stories are important to hear and tell. What I loved about Peace lab is that we had the opportunity to talk to and meet so many different people, this was very helpful for our project: “Humans of Kosovo”. Inspired by Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York, we seek to tell the story of the diversity of people in Kosovo and build peace through understanding different perspectives. 

The project was challenging as it is incredibly hard to ask deep and personal questions in a limited amount of time and not to overwhelm the person you are talking to. What was extremely helpful was that we learned to ask questions in a way that was less intimidating or attacking. Starting your question by introducing yourself, and then asking it in a way that you “want to understand how/why...” or you “were wondering if…” It creates the open space and the necessary mutual respect that is needed to ask big questions. 

Looking back on Kosovo it was the perfect experience to start off my capstone year, I saw how theory is applied to reality, what difficulties people are really facing and in what ways research can benefit a post-conflict country. I was inspired by the amount of people putting their hearts into their work, and working towards a better tomorrow, towards peace and towards Europe. I was amazed by the Kosovars who even when they couldn’t travel to our countries, welcomed us with open hearts and open arms. 

I am so grateful to Anne for organizing this trip every year again, to all of the students that came here and asked the right questions, and to Erik, Enver, and Bardha ensuring our safety and comfort during these 10 days. It has been the experience of a lifetime and I will never forget the lessons that I learned here.