The workshop in Baku was my first time travelling with a VISA, it was a very nice experience overall and I enjoyed seeing our partner organizations again in person. Baku is a beautiful city and we were able to see different parts of it. The organizers of Nayora planned the workshop really well, in the mornings and afternoon we would have the training sessions and every evening we would go out to dinner and try many different foods at places around the city. The old city was very suggestive and amazing to walk around. We also met many local volunteers of our Azerbaijani partner organization and they were all very invested and active in volunteering, we exchanged contacts and I hope we will remain in contact.
I didn’t know what to expect out of this 5 day workshop and I learned so much about peace education in so little time. I was surprised that I hadn’t taken part to such projects before, trainings with informal learning are a great way to learn new skills and competencies, and by the end of the session I took back to Passau a lot of new knowledge.
During my experience in Baku, as I said, I met many young volunteers, and I also got to know Aegee Baki and we will keep in contact to organize maybe later on some events with Aegee Passau, other than that I enjoyed the last day a lot where some volunteers of Nayora joined us for dinner and we chatted about our experiences of volunteering and about the differences about pizza in Italy and Azerbaidjan. In the evening, often unfortunately we didn’t make it to meet up and go to bars all together, which I found was a pity, but understandably everyone was very tired, so usually the three of us from GLL would go out to pubs in the evening, although we learned from a volunteer of Nayora that that isn´t really a cultural thing. Another evening I really enjoyed was going to the tea house in Baku, where we were able to taste an amazing cup of tea and have a beautiful conversation. During one of the workshop sessions we learned about the tool Life Line, this was also a good way of exchanging words and getting to know each other, I found it very interesting and nice to hear the story of another participant and have the chance to talk together directly.
The trainer was really good, she organized the session outline really well, by giving enough theoretic input and also explaining and letting us try out different methods. One of the methods that surprised me the most was Win As Much As You Can, I found it a very good way of explaining conflicts and why conflicts begin in a simple way: at the base there is always trust. The workshop helped me learn a lot about peace education and I am now even more than before interested in working and volunteering for the project. What I think a message for peace could be is that Peace can be found if people trust each other and treat each other equally.