This weekend a few of the grade 10's attended the Cypress Student Summit 2009 at Mulgrave School. The topic for this year is "Human Aspect of the Conflict in the Middle East," undoubtly has a direct relationship to Persepolis. Here are a few parts out of the many from this conference that I think are very inspiriting and worth telling.
On Saturday, during one of the workshop, a student presented an organization called Peace is together. In 2008, there were ten Palestinian, ten Israeli, and ten Canadian teens (age15-20) came together in Vancouver to participate in an "extraordinary dialogue and filmmaking experience". The participants lived and learned together for three weeks. During the first two weeks, they were in the process of getting comfortable with each other, and on the last five days, they started to make short films based on some of the issues happening in the Middle East.
I think it must have been a valuable experience for all participants because although these three groups of teenagers grew up from different countries with different cultural backgrounds and experiences, they do have many things in common and became great friends. They also produced many amazing films which I would urge you to take a look at the following website:
http://www.creativepeacenetwork.ca/
Full group simulation(cultural splash)
In the afternoon of Saturday, all the delegates came together and line up in pairs ready to enter a room, which we had no idea what was about. The room was filled with silence and darkness. I was told to take my shoes off and sit on the floor. Soon after everyone was in the room, I realized that all the girls were sitting on the floor with shoes off, and all guys get to sit on the chairs with their shoes on. It was some kind of sexism I thought. After 10 minutes, the room was still completely silent. Then a few of the Grade 12 students started to hand out freezing grapes. I then soon realized that all the guys didn't have to eat by themselves, they were fed by the Grade 12s, yet the girls has to take the grapes with their hands and feed ourselves. From my perspective, this was unfair to the ladies because we didn't get to sit on chairs, or get fed by others, and has to take our shoes off; however, I was wrong. The grade 12s explained that the ladies were actually getting the benefits not the boys (women give birth to babies): we, the girls, get to take our shoes off and sit on the ground is a privilege because we could get closer to the earth, while the boys were farther away from the earth b/c they were separated by a chair and their shoes. We have the privilege to feel/touch our food (grapes) before we eat while the boys don’t because the grapes were fed directly into their mouth. This group simulation make me realized that our perspective about other cultures might be different than we expected. We might think that it is "normal" for one that get to sit on a chair has a higher position than the one sitting on the floor, however we could not use our "normal" way of thinking to determine others to be "abnormal", because at the end, what is normal and what is not?
The last part of the day, Gwynne Dyer (the first photo) was there as a guess speaker talking about the Middle East. It was fascinating to hear him talking and making connections on social, economic and political relationships between the Middle East and the rest of the world and specifically, the US. He also talked about the roots of terrorism and its formation and strategy. One other interesting thing he pointed out was that the Middle East is actually one of the most stable area in the world because after all that they have gone through, no major changes has been made.
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