My most significant experience from the training was developing empathy towards all the personal experiences I heard and reflecting on my own experiences and knowledge from peace education and dealing with the past.
My biggest impression is that the training was very much process oriented and learning happened both at the personal and group level.
The empathy-based experiential learning is definitely the most prominent aspect of this training, and also its biggest strength, because without developing the capacity for being truly present and understanding with all our senses and our hearts what other people in the region have experienced and heard throughout the events of the 1990s, there can be no real regional reconciliation and learning from the past.
To this day, I recommend CNA’s Basic Training in Peacebuilding to everyone in the nongovernmental sector. I don’t think there is any other regional peace education and reconciliation programme of this level of quality. For years, this training has been true to the essence of peace education – providing support in creating a safe group atmosphere where many will engage for the first time in their lives in an empathy-based learning experience about the war and post-war past. I have nothing but words of praise for the inclusive segment of the training, both in terms of selecting participants of different profiles and in terms of enabling the participants to follow the entirety of the training in all the regional languages.
This training gave me an opportunity for holistic personal development and developed my capacities so that today I can successfully work for the United Nations.
A great many thanks to the entire CNA team for giving me the opportunity to learn and I will always support their work.