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😁😁