VISUAL MOMENTS - FINALLY, THE PICTURES!

After writing all these stories, I also put some pictures on line. The address is photos.yahoo.com/bc/gabiwerner and there are many interesting people and moments shown.

FIRST MOMENTS IN BRAZIL

I arrived in Brazil early in the morning, after a long trip back while which I needed to translate english to spanish to a pregnant girl from Ecuador, who wasn't able to speak english, french or german, languages spoken by the flight attendants.

However, instead of landing in São Paulo - where Helena, Malhado and Marcio were waiting for me - we landed in Campinas, because of bad weather. It took us 3 hours to finally get to São Paulo.

By that time, my friends were not in the airport anymore. As my intention was to stay in São Paulo at least one day and I had missed my flight back to Florianópolis, I talked to the travel agency (with some difficulty, after 10 weeks without speaking portuguese) and could finally postpone my flight to the next day.

So, I went to downtown, had lunch with my friends and went to Ibirapuera with Malhado, where we visited a impressive exposition about chinese history and culture. After that, we went to a happy hour with AIESECers and trainees and had wine and cheese in Malhado's house.

The conversation was fantastic and, again, I almost didn't sleep, as my flight was scheduled to 7 a.m. Paolla's mother took me in Florianópolis' airport and I finally got home.

ZURICH, MUCH BETTER NOW!

After coming back from Germany, I slept one more night in Kasia's, witnessed Kristy lose her train to Ljubljana, went to the Palace of Culture once more and took the bus with Blajez and Ben for the last time.

I bought 2 more zubruwkas in the airport and took the plane headed to Zurich, where I would spend around 6 hours. The city was much more attractive know, comparing to its state 2 months ago. The temparature was very pleasant, there was a lot o people on the streets and near the rivers, and I could enjoy my time getting to know people, walking around and reading a book. The only problem around Switerzland, however, are the prices. Eating a sandwich and drinking a soft drink in Zurich downtown was maybe the most expensive meal of my life.

Now was time to come back to the airport and to Brazil.

BERLIN, HERE WE GO!

As the traineeship has come to its end, I decided to travel a little bit out of Poland. Unfortunately, I have little time, as I need to come back to my studies in Brazil soon.

My first plan was to go to Prague, in Czech Republic, but bureoacracy involving visa procedures made me give up this time.

So, me and Kristy decided to go to Germany, as none of us would need visa and we could stay in her friend's house in Berlin, who was originally from Argentina - and very cute! We took a 6 hours train in Warsaw and had no problems.

Berlin surprised me a lot. I thought I would find organized and excessively strict city and figured out that it really was not like that. Berlin is a very cosmopolite city, full of culture and diversity. I was missing a lot to see different people! Getting in touch with a gay parade, anti-Iraq war protest, turkish barbecues and thai restaurants was awesome! We also visited museums, a church, a synagogue, the wall, a tower and a mexican pub.

It was very worthwhile!

BACK IN WARSAW

After 2 months of great experiences, time to come back has come. We all left oru cities and schools and came back to Warsaw. The feeling was quite strange: at the same time, satisfaction, for accomplishing a mission and for living great moments; and sadness, for saying goodbye.

Good part of trainees met at a pub on wednesday night, but we weren't able, because of logistical problems while picking us up in the train station. During the next days, lots of conversation, stories and evaluation for the project.

After the endind ceremony, we had a little party in Kasia's house (my host). Jason showed us some Tae Kon Do and we all ate pierogi - again, but for the last time.

On Frinday night (april 18th), we had a really, really nice time together for a cooking party. The dishes were definetely great, especially Jason's chinese food: chicken with honey and lemon - wonderful! Besides, we had tex-mex food; ucranian salad - without vegetables!; perubian spicy meat; italian risotto; polish crokete; ucranian cake; and, of course, caipirinha! Including, we had some kind of church of caipirinha, in which everybody prayed and promised to do something. I was great!

On tuesday night (april 22nd), Corin arrived to Kasia's apartment (where there were already me, Angie, Ben and Kasia), after travelling through 3 countries from Hungary, as she took the wrong train. We talked a lot and early in the morning she and Angie went to the airport in order to come back. Time to say goodbye had rally arrived...

TEACHING TOLERANCE

As you all can imagine, our mission was quite hard: teaching tolerance. In the very beginning, AIESEC told us we could even just talk about our countries, because indirectly the students would get in touch with other cultures and start to respect them. However, after long talks and discussions, most of trainees agreed that we should enjoy the most we could this opportunity and cause the biggest impact, especially because this project had been created because of intolerance problems in Poland, mainly concerning skin heads. Then, we decided to talk directly about tolerance, respect, understanding and diversity.

For doing that, we used different techniques, but all of them tried to involve the students and have them participating in discussions and activities. Many times, the language was an important barrier, as the students could talk a lot. Anyway, generaly they understood almost everything. And we created some means to overcome this problem.

As the topic was tolerance, we brought many different subjects and used our situation as foreigners to start some conversations. For example, different religions (still a big issue in Poland), races, physical appearance, sexual orientation, nationalities, etc. The most polemic used to be the homossexual and the religious topic, as people in small towns are very catholic and conservative. We not only talked with them about those subjects, but made some dynamics for them to feel discriminated; brought other religious symbols and believes and, sometimes, replaced them instead of crosses (catholic symbol present in every classroom); told them we were homossexuals or from very different countries, if we felt they were intolerant toward certain group; talked about some important historical examples of intolerance (and of tolerance), especially from our countries; analysed with them the situation and problems of the world; and tried to build a common and peaceful view fot the world, using their artistical talents.

With all these methods, I think we reached many people, who started thinking about the world and about their prejudices. Besides, just being there, working in a multicultural team and sharing many moments with students was an example of some benefits of living diversity.

JASLO IN OUR HEARTS

Our last city is called Jaslo and we stayed there just 4 days (April 13th - 16th), as the school had Easter holidays from thursday on. But that didn't make your time less special, because we really, really enjoy this school - certainly one of the best ever!

Although they had received other PEACE trainees last month, it was great to get in touch with the students, as the focus of our classes was on tolerance (differently from the other group, that mainly presented their countries). We had a lot of freedom to develop our classes and the students really interacted, in and outside our classes. We went out with them every day, to pubs or their houses. Once, we had a Luau, a party outside with fire and sausages to cook. It was a little bit cold, but not near the fire. Wonderful! Many stories and great spirit! We also watched AliG, an english comedian that is very funny, but stupid sometimes.

The weather started to be nicer, with blue sky and good temperature. Anyway, we still needed our coats.

My family was perfect, too. I lived with 2 girls and their mother - a doctor, who has travelled a lot and showed me lots of pictures. She spoke some German and our comunication use to be in that language. The food was also very, very good - some soups, salad, fish and pierogi, much lighter than the last 2 months. Just to see how nice they were, in order to take a faster train back to Warsaw (4 hours instead of 9), they drove us 1 hour to Tarnów. Detail: my mother was loudly listening to discopolo, singing and dancing "I'm so sexy, sexy, sexy". Fantastic!