Living together in a summer camp with 600 kids around is a human rights education process itself, as our trainers said, and they were right. In July, the three of us took part in a human rights education workshops, within the framework of the Social Model Exchange project, which combines the tools of social circus, participatory theatre and human rights education. The workshop took place in Tsaf-Tsouf - a summer for children in Greece, near Kavala.

Human rights is something quite hard to describe. On the first impression we can think that human rights are so obvious, that everybody is conscious about them – and later on we can realize that we should learn a lot about what human rights are, and especially how to practice them in everyday life.

I think we got very useful knowledge and skills in the workshop. I acquired more specific information about human rights, and discovered new ways how to access to this knowledge. Also, we had the chance to experience carrying out workshops in this topic – among each other, and also involving children and young leaders from the camp. This workshops helped me realize that human rights is a field that everybody can and should access, and that non-formal and informal methods are really successful and effective to use when it comes to this topic. It was a very nice experience to see how children, even the youngest are involved in the games and willing to share their opinion.

We were introduced to the COMPASS – Manual on Human Rights Education – handbook that very well synthetize activities to use in the topic of.

As I mentioned, living together with 600 children for a week it’s a great experience itself. It was really nice to be part of the life of the camp, and having some contact with the kids. And also, it was a great pleasure to be part of our international group, and work with the Spanish participants from Associación Circolio from Valencia, the Greek people from Kids in Action from Thessaloniki, and also Kriti and Aliya, who were volunteers in the camp for the whole summer. I think it was a really inspiring team, and we could cooperate very well from the first day, and it was particularly nice to realize a workshop together for the campleaders.

From the experiences I had in this week, I feel that three fields, human rights education, social circus and participatory theatre can be successfully integrated, and I’m looking forward this project to be continued.

Hanna Eichner