AMAZING 💜💜 #frenchitalianportuguesespanishteams

Hi! This is the Italian team (Matteo, Giuseppe, Luana, Carmen, Mariapia, Liliana and Gaia). We are in Spain and today has been a very long but exciting, funny, touching and interesting day. We’ve visited the centre for refugees in the ancient city of Sigüenza in the Spanish hinterland, where we have met four refugees with an incredible and touching story (a Cameroon’s woman who has been discriminated for her sexual orientation; a couple of Palestine who is discriminated in Israel and who decided to come to Spain to seek asylum; a Russian couple who has been discriminated for religious orientation; a Colombian couple who seeks asylum and protection after they left Colombia where they lived in a dangerous area, known for terrorist attacks). All of them made us feel very touched by their story and their personality (happy for the protection and the peace they have received but still they are tried for their difficult and traumatic experience). This taught us how we have to be thankful for our life and to be lucky to live in peace, without problems of any kind. After this emotional experience, we visited the beautiful Sigüenza’s cathedral, with its gothic architecture and its long story (it was a place that was liked also by the king of Spain in the Middle Ages) and then we visited the beautiful ancient village. The lunch has been a new and pleasing experience because we ate for the first time the “paella”, one of the most well known specialities in Spain (it is rice with meat, fish and vegetables). After lunch, a brief break under the trees and then we made a long trip walking inside the national park of Alto Tajo, with its wonderful landscapes who remarks the old western movies and its fauna like vultures that were flying above us during our whole trip. It’s been exciting because some of us climbed on the side of a mountain and saw a waterfall along a steep and bumpy road, with many rocks and sand. We came back homesafe 😂😂and really tired but with more experience in our mind...

Poetry day. Students from Liceo Caracense High School reciting lovely poems in the renaissance courtyard.

On April 23rd, we celebrated at Liceo Caracense World Book Day. We celebrate it every year, but this time, it was connected to our Joining Hands project. Students with an immigrant background read poetry in their family's original language: Arabic, Romanian, Bulgarian, Italian, Chinese... And we also read chapters of "Don Quixote de la Mancha" in different languages. We are all travellers, and the whole school took advantage of another opportunity to celebrate diversity.

Here you have some photos and videos of the event.

Hi! We are the Spanish Team again😉. We are waiting for you to come to our city. We have a "Joining Hands Space" in our high school which we are decorating the best we can, but it is not easy and many people of the high school, even who are not in the project, they are helping us to make it look great and beautiful. Here you can see some pictures of decorating process.

Hi! We are the Spanish team; Anna, Sara and Alba. We want to tell you our experience during our formation to make debates.
We've been representing different countries in a model of United Nations, each one of us had to defend a stance about the situation in Middle East, more specifically, about Syrian conflict.
At the beginning, it was a little bit difficult because we had never participated in a MUN but then, after looking for much information, we started enjoining and we did good work.
We are glad to tell you that when all of you come here, you will participate in a similar experience. We are very sure that you will take benefit of it and you will learn new concepts, besides new people with different opinions.

https://youtu.be/T13bxcOquho

This incredible and unforgettable experience has just finished.

This incredible and unforgettable experience has just finished. During this week we have put ourselves in the migrants' shoes. We have faced language barriers and misunderstandings. Despite this, we have met incredible people that we will never forget, which means that they will be always in our hearts. Terms like humanity, diversity or freedom must be present in our minds. Social progress is improving nowadays, but we still have a lot to do. We've known how some organisations provide first aid, access to healthcare, education, and other main services to migrants. The Erasmus+ has helped us to take into account that we are all humans with the same rights and dignity. Unfortunately, this doesn't always happen. That's why this project has made us being more open-minded and to understand all the difficulties migrants handle. This has been a much appreciated experience, so we must thank you all the people who has made this possible (teachers, Blaise Pascal highschool, the Euorpean Union...). In conclusion, we should ask ourselves one simple question: What can I do to avoid this situation? This is in our hands, we are all migrants, don't forget it.

There is still a long way to go...

We have almost come to the end of this short but intense Erasmus plus experience (joing hands for a better future). All the activities carried out (the visit to the national migration museum, the exhibition on migrant artists, the interview we gave to the migrants and the subsequent report on the experience they had and, lastly, the vision of the documentary "human flow" he made me understand once again that the world can not yet be considered civilized.
There is still much to be done and we must be the first to bring radical changes by eliminating forever words like discrimination, inequality, poverty and war forever.
This experience made with friends is people from other countries, has made me understand even more the importance of foreign language that nowadays is essential for being able to expand in the social and in the working field😁😁

Paris!! We are the Spanish team. It's a pleasure been here. A really great challenge for all and to learn from all the people that surround us.

Hi!
Today was the first day in Segré, France.
We arrived yesterday at midnight, the journey was very tiring and we had to wait more than three hours at the airport in Bruxelles, but we did it 💪.
Today we saw the school in Segré, which is bigger than ours, and we did a very interesting activity with some migrants living here.
After school (at 5pm) my host family took me to Angers, a beautiful town nearby: we went a bit sightseeing and I was enchanted to see the castle and the cathedral 😍

BRIDGING THE GAP
Knowing a language inexorably allows you to access a brand new world. It bestows on you countless qualities, such as that of being able to flee the path you're supposed to be familiar with to start treading upon marvelous new fields. This is just one of the many reasons for which I fancy learning foreign languages. My name is Antonio Cilibrizzi, I am seventeen years old and extremely enthusiastic about this Erasmus+ project. Some of my ancestors reckoned the USA to be home to valuable job opportunities. They, therefore, left Italy at the beginning of the 20th century to embark on a very extenuating trip to Cleveland, Ohio. Their decision turned out to be a veritable success, as a matter of fact, one of their thirteen children, Anthony, became a well known politician and was even appointed as Secretary of Health, Welfare and Education by President Kennedy. This inevitably marked a pivotal change in the history of the Celebrezze family. One of their members had been capable of obtaining glory and fame out of nothing.

Hi there!

Hi there,

I am Carola from Italy and I am very very happy to take part in my high school’s Erasmus+ Project.  I will meet teenagers from Spain, Portugal and France, thus having the chance to have new friends to share ideas, photos and experiences with.

I wanted to take part in this European Project, because I like travelling and getting to know different cultures, lifestyles, ways of relating to events and other people.

Recently I have been studying in Montreal in Canada. Montreal is a wonderful city with a real multicultural society whose citizens come from all over the world.  There I really felt I was no longer just an Italian as well as a European citizen, but a world citizen.

It has been an amazing experience to study and live in a bilingual speaking country, where everybody could speak at least two or three languages.

And what about you? Are you also interested in foreign languages and cultures as I am? Have you ever been living and studying abroad? Did you like it?

See you soon, Carola  

Hi everybody! I am Liliana and I am 16. I live in Potenza in Italy and today I’d like to let you know the reason why I chose to join this project . I like discovering and relating to every kind of person; people are so different from each other and these differences make the human being beautiful. We should learn to appreciate all of them and in my opinion this experience could help us to achieve this result. Besides there is also the improvement of some general skills, such as the language ones. What about you? What is the reason why you chose to join this project?

Tell me about it whenever you can.

We will talk soon!

                                                                                Liliana

Hello everyone! 

We are Carmen and Mariella, we are classmates and this is what we think about our involvement in the project JH4BF so far. 

When we found out we had the opportunity to join this project we were excited, motivated and a bit worried.It's the first time we have been cooperating with foreign schools. 

Of course Erasmus+ has been giving us the possibility to improve our English (which is the official and only language we can use), but mostly we feel now more self-confident and we are able to manage international situations better. 

Since October we discovered how our ancestors felt when they migrated from our region to look for a better life abroad. We noticed the differences between them and us: while we travel for fun and adventure, they travelled for necessity. Travelling was not and easy thing to do, just like for immigrants who arrive in Europe nowadays. They left their families with nothing in their pockets, they could not speak the language of the country of their dreams, turning out to be incomprehensible for native speakers. The worst thing about all of that was surely being considered as dirty animals with no rights.

We hope all the activities will help us and all the pupils involved in this project to open our minds and to see the phenomenon of migration in a different way!

I'm happy to be part of a project, an Erasmus project whose main purpose is to make us aware of what being a migrant means. We've talked about migration a lot and we'll keep doing it for a while. How difficult it's been for our own people to leave their home for a new life in the past, but how difficult it still is for other people to do the same nowadays. My schoolmates and I talked to them, we interviewed some of them and then we presented this project to the rest of the school. I'm really enjoying what I'm doing and I'm glad to be a member of this Erasmus group; I can't wait to leave home for a week to live in one of the other countries, 'cause this is what we'll be dong too: exchange. I'll be trying to share the life of a new family for six days and someone else that's part of the project will try to be part of my family next year. What do I expect from this activity? I expect to get to know how other European people live, to open up my mind and to introduce new habits in my life, why not? I'm pretty sure I'll be satisfied with what I'll have done at the end of this. Hope you'll read about me soon.

HEY WHASSUP?
I'm Gaia, this is my first post and I'm gonna explain to you what this is all about.