Once upon a time, there was a class: VIII. They were friendly and they liked us a lot but you could feel that some of the kids were skeptical towards us (especially boys) and the class was divided into groups (mainly boy „gang“ and girl „gang“).

Every day the activities went quite effortlessly but you could notice some bullying and negative interaction among the kids. Nothing very specific, just some laughs, some jokes on account of the more quiet children.

One day we discovered that they enjoy listening to our personal stories (we gave example of bullying from our own experience). On the last lesson we had an activity about bullying and discrimination and we gave a speech on few bad guys in a group, using animals from our stories as examples and we noticed that this actually touched them because they were very silent and obviously emotionally involved. Some girls came up and mentioned that the they really liked the compliment sessions and they really liked hugging us at the end of the activity and some showed interest in specific topics we talked about. Because of that we managed to connect with them on a more personal level.

Until finally, we noticed that the negative leaders got more quiet, more ashamed of their actions and the quiet bullied children got braver, were smiling more and asking more questions.

Volunteers: Lukas Mickelevic (Lithuania), Gesine Reihnardt (Germany), Karl Magnus Moshuus (Norway).
The activity is part of the project Cre-Acting Yourself, granted by European Solidarity Corps program of European Union.
The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the National Agency and Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein