This year’s No Hate Movement training course took place in Cavan, near to Caste Saunderson, Ireland between 15-22 Novembers.
From 15 countries 40 participants were coming to Dublin on 15th of November and after a two hours journey we arrived to Castle Saunderson International Scout Centre and the week of learning from and about each other began. The main topic of the training was of course hate speech, how to fight against it online and in the real world as well. But to be more specific we chose narrower subjects: borders, diversity, equality and dialogue. During the week we had many plenary sessions with several guests from NGOs, dealing with different issues, such as hate speech against LGBTQ, community building in Ireland, the two-Ireland conflict. We spent a day in Dublin, where we had a chance to meet the members of Pavee Point, an organisation for traveller’s rights. Also we visited a mosque, where the imam thought us a lot about Islamophobia and the ongoing crisis in Middle-East and ISIS. All of these presentations were very useful and eye-opening helping us a lot dealing with all the hate that we see in our home countries and on the internet on daily basis.
The week’s biggest task was to join one of the four different solidarity labs and create something amazing together with the others in the topic of borders. The four labs offered opinion for anyone to take part, doesn’t matter if it was your first time doing anything like this. The Music Lab was opened for everyone, nobody cared if you have a good voice or not, as well the Video Lab, you were useful no matter how. The other two labs, ICCT and Human Rights were also very creative; you did not need any previous knowledge about anything. It was amazing to discover how many bright ideas people have, how fun is it to work together, become a team and be very productive. At the end of the week, every Lab came up with something wonderful, the Video Lab made a great video, the Music Lab wrote a beautiful song, the ICCT Lab created an Instagram and Facebook site, and the Human Rights Lab developed a mini-campaign. All of them were about crossing borders, accepting each other and using love instead of hate.
The motto, Crossing borders might seems boring or a bit of a cliché but during this week everyone could experience it on their own skins how true this sentence is, and how easy is it to keep crossing borders. We crossed the borders of language, experience, real borders between countries and at the end of the week we became a big, multicultural family. We also crossed the borders of gastronomy on the inter-cultural night, when we had the chance to try other nation’s food speciality.
This type of non-formal learning, that training courses can offer is mind-blowing. We were able to learn and experience so much more about human rights, equality and diversity than ever before. We would like to thank everyone, who made this happen for us: Eurobug, No Hatespeech Movement and the Foundation of Subjective Values!
Also we would like to encourage everyone to be brave enough to learn new thing from others, listen to their opinion and last but least, keep crossing borders!
