I was nervous. I should not have been tense, because I knew there are going to be nice people inside. I was waiting in front of the building of Artemisszió Foundation and a Hungarian celebrity from the 90’s passed me by on the street of Pál utca. I tried to consider that a „somehow good sign from the universe”. Yes, I was still pretty much concerned. The reason, I guess was simple, I was not sure if my planned activity called „The Protest Game” would work.
Back in January, 2015 I was in Finland to do workshops about multiculturalism and tolerance in high schools around Helsinki and Espoo. It was the three of us, who made this so called „Protest Game” with one Italian guy and a Slovak girl, both are around my age (23) and now it sounds very offical. We are the ones, who created this! Behold of the almighty protest game! So, anyway our task was to make the workshops as interactive as we could. We tried to come up with interactive activities for students for every topic what we selected during these workshops. The second topic of these occasions was immigration and I think it was Alex, or Zuzana who came up with this particular idea.
Seriously though, this activity was only used in high schools and elemenatry schools and with Artemisszió Foundation’s „Ready, Study & Go Project” I guess it went pretty smoothly also. It was a pleasant suprise that instead of the planned twenty minutes session the international participants divided in groups were „protesting” and arguing together for more than an hour (!) after they presented their main cause of their protest.
Every group had to pick a cardboard (in this case it was an A/3 paper) and they had to come up with a catchy slogan and a cause what they don’t like about the goverment’s actions with the current refugee crisis. Finnish high school students did almost as good as Ready, Study & Go and Danish elementary school students were also suprisingly good concidering their young age. Their task was almost the same, however it was about immigration in general. As an alternative, Finnish high school students could choose any other relevant political topic and Danish elementary school students could protest what they found negative in their local schools.
The international participants of „Ready, Study & Go!” were mostly against the wall what the Hungarian government built on the Hungarian-Serbian border and they were also protesting in this game how everyone should just simply treat the refugees as human beings. My aim was that nobody should be afraid and everyone should let their voice be heard. Hopefully, we could reach even more than these two main goals. All my concerns went away about the activity and the people. The discussions just went on and on and suprisingly, or not, we could not even finish.
Well, I guess it is a happy ending for an innocent team activity.
Kristof Szerencses
