Peace Lab returns

By Lily Doolan Burke

 

Writing this blog has a decidedly different feel to the previous one. The first wave of blogs we wrote simply centred on our everyday lives whilst in Kosovo. For me this one has been much more difficult to write. When you finally realise just how much you have experienced in those ten days it can get a bit tricky to put it all into words or narrow your focus down to one or two aspects of this whirlwind intensive. 

 It is no surprise then that since I am, not so subtly, struggling with writing my personal reflection, I have decided to postpone doing so as long as possible and shall first discuss the project I completed along with four other AUC students: Maaike, Noé, Lara and Daria. Baptised by Anne as the dream team, which admittedly caused some good-natured outrage among the other groups until it became clear why: our project after all was on the subject of dreams and as such, the name had nothing to do with the quality of the group, or at least that is what was implied, though I still choose to believe otherwise. 

 In any case to the point: for our Peace Lab project we created a book called “Kosovo Dreams” that held a collection of all the interviews we conducted while away. We asked all our interviewees about their dreams and hopes for the future, be that on a personal level or with regards to Kosovo. 

Interviewing, it is safe to say, is or rather was not my forte. At the beginning of our stay in Kosovo I realised just how awkward interviewing someone can be. Let alone trying to start a conversation that needed to lead to the question “What is your dream?” Eventually we realised that this terrifyingly big question was quite a bit scarier than we had initially thought, so we gradually began to dilute it into more manageable questions of “What would your ideal tomorrow look like?”, “What do you hope for your children?” etc.

We chose this topic, although credits to Lara for the original idea, because we wanted to choose something that was universal, after all dreams are something everyone has thought of at some point or another. We also thought that it could lead to interesting answers. Maybe it could show us how a country that often felt divided into separate communities actually found common ground in hopes and dreams or whether the differences would actually be quite great between one individual and another. 

While we hoped to get a very varied group of people to interview, we unfortunately did not really manage that as many of the people we interviewed were, for example, employed, of a similar age, or background. Yet still the answers we got often differed greatly nonetheless. But one thing that often returned in each interview we did was visa liberalisation. 

People wanted to be able to travel freely through Europe. And here is where I shall finally slip into a more self-reflective note, because this was something that I now think of often and it impacted me greatly when listening to not only our interviewees but everyone I had the chance to speak to in Kosovo. 

Today I drove from the Netherlands to Germany and seamlessly crossed from country to country and usually I would hardly even have noticed anything had happened. After all, I was not checked, I was not stopped, and generally throughout my life I have taken this luxury for granted. I often don’t think about what it would mean to be forbidden from going somewhere, to have such complicated obstacles in my way that obtaining a visa would be nigh impossible. 

I am mad at myself for not always recognizing just how privileged I am that by chance this freedom of movement has been afforded to me. I know this is not the only place where such barriers exist, but because we got on such a personal level with so many people there, I feel like in Kosovo the ramifications of such a situation hit me differently than had I just heard about them in a classroom for example. This is of course not the only thing that stuck with me, I wish I could discuss everything I wanted to about Kosovo, but that could fill a book and frankly, it was stressful enough making just one of those this week. So I shall limit myself to ending by saying that I am grateful I got the chance to visit Kosovo. It may sound cliché but I don’t think I’ll ever forget my time there.