a bit of sun and a bit of rain
“Students Connect” Peacebuilding Training for Students, Ulcinj 2 – 9 October 2026
To protect our children, we explain the world to them in short and simple stories about good and evil, children find them easy to remember. When we incorporate our own experience of violence and injustice into our stories, they become more permanent and deeply imprinted. From the perspective of a child, re-examining these stories would mean questioning the truthfulness of those who took care of them and sought to protect them. This is no easy step.
Taking shelter from the danger presented by those who are supposed to hate us is a precaution that is not easily abandoned. Only occasionally can youthful rebellion and curiosity lead young people to take the leap and find out first-hand about what used to be unquestioned. Sometimes decisively and boldly, sometimes timidly and gradually, young people build their image of the world through encounters and opportunities that are easily or not so easily available.
I spent 7 days with 19 young people from Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and North Macedonia, sifting through the burden of knowledge they came with, witnessing their indestructible and radiant curiosity and their courage to ask and to tell, and to find out. The encouragement and invitation to do so, with a safe space to try it out, only helped along a process they already desired and welcomed.
As the days pass from that powerful experience, I am only beginning to realise what I have learned with them. Today is only the third day since. I am writing this because I have a strong desire to share part of this experience.
In a moment of inspiration, we called the Peacebuilding Training for Students “Students Connect”. The experience we achieved created an electric circuit. The twenty-three of us present, the training team and the participants, lit up like light bulbs within it.
At the end of the training, many people said our group was an exceptional collection of people, with incredible human qualities and potentials. I don’t agree, because I think that the only difference between us and an average group of people is that we had the opportunity to experience what we experienced. And what we experienced were encounters between children whose parents were marked by war, who live in a world intent on harming them with hatred, whose causes they don’t understand, although at least a grain of that same hatred exists in each of us in the form of experience. They live in a world in which their neighbours are constantly portrayed as threats and enemies.
It was a few years ago, at the opening of our exhibition in Novi Pazar, that I spoke for the first time about how as a small child, when I travelled with my parents, my father would say “Muslims live here”. He would say it as a solemn warning, but all I understood was that I was supposed to fear those people, those Muslims, without knowing why. What he said has stayed imprinted in my memory 50 years later.
Today, 30 years after the war, thousands upon thousands of parents are telling their children, “They live here”. And the children absorb those words as they grow and shape their personalities.
And what is it that we did at the “Students Connect” training?
We gave them an opportunity to hear and see “those from the other side”, to learn their stories, their fears, to see their tears and feel their compassion. Compassion from the other side, from those they are meant to fear, because their parents had experienced injustice and pain, with some still very vocal in sowing hatred. We trained to separate those two in our minds, to examine what makes us who we are, to go back to the question of choice about who we want to be. And, quite unexpectedly for many, these wishes overlap, blend, flow with all their diversity into a circuit of compassion, support and pride.
And you know what else? I know for a fact that nineteen people will not be telling their children that those others are their enemies. They have achieved a reformatting.
They have unlocked the doors of narratives formed on the experience of violence and injustice, without rejecting them as senseless, but with understanding and determination, they stepped out into the world they see with changed eyes, connected and tied together with trust in their own strength, with conviction that it is worth fighting for justice, for truth, for a better world.
And they can do it, youth is incredible. All they need is a bit of sun and a bit of rain, and that’s what they got for starters in Ulcinj.