By Liza Pol
With the beginning of July in sight, our virtual trip to Kosovo has come to an end. With hardly any knowledge of Kosovo, I joined Peace Lab. This lack of knowledge was quickly tackled by Anne in the first week, in which we read and gave presentations about the history of Kosovo. The two following weeks were filled with meetings with interesting organisations and people. It is difficult to point out one or two favourite meetings, but I will give it a shot anyway.
Firstly, I greatly enjoyed the meeting with Elizabeth Gowing from The Ideas Partnership, an NGO that helps people with a bottom-up approach. I was very inspired by the story of how The Ideas Partnership started and their motto “If you learn, you teach and if you get, you give”. I am hoping to actively apply this in my own life as well. During Peace Lab, I spent about half the month at my parents’ home and even though I told them about our meetings every dinner, I only stopped talking about this meeting when everyone had already emptied their plates, as an illustration of my enthusiasm. Secondly and perhaps not unsurprisingly, I thought the meeting with the Prime Minister was amazing. It was very special to be able to meet him and ask our questions.
During the meetings and the last week, we worked on our projects. Together with Birte, I created an Instagram page. We got our inspiration from the page @humansofny, where portraits of people are posted accompanied by one of their stories. We wanted to create something similar but feature people from Kosovo and organisations active in Kosovo. Every post was written from a personal narrative. We found the people in our posts through Instagram and the meetings organised by Anne de Graaf and Nini Pieters.
We are not fully finished with our project as I am writing this, but I can say that I have enjoyed working on it a lot! Each of our interviewees was incredibly kind and open to share their stories with two more-or-less strangers from Amsterdam. The Instagram statistics tell us that we have reached over 300 people and we have gained 71 followers, which I think is decent for such a short period. Our page will stay public and online so that people can still view the photos and stories after this academic year has officially ended. The pictures added to this blogpost are some of the pictures we posted along with the stories. Please check out our Instagram page for more pictures and these stories! This is the link:
https://www.instagram.com/peaceofkosovo/.
From our classes and the time dedicated to the project, I have learned many things. Most importantly, my knowledge about peacebuilding has improved. I used to think of it as this big, vague concept that mostly the UN was occupied with, but I now see the importance of individuals and local organisations in building sustainable peace. It became clear to me that bottom-up approaches and grassroots initiatives make huge differences. One of our interviewees even told us that her parents’ attitude towards groups of people has changed because of her choice to go to a mixed university. This is just an example, but I think it shows how one decision or action can change a lot of things. We have met many inspiring people this past month and they have each motivated me to pursue a career in something I believe in as well, I hope you have enjoyed reading the Peace Lab 2021 blog!
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