Two Steps Behind

There are certain changes in national and international level; wars, countries' detachements, regimes' changes etc that have taken plave during the last century and have had certain impacts to all European countries, one of them being mass immigration.

Considerable masses of people, in desperate, in most cases, economic situation started moving across borders in reach for a better tomorrow. Locals' xenophobia and suspiciousness did not allow them to get employed and reach a decent way of living and so, to integrate in general.

Today, there are refugees from all over the world and with only few exceptions they all struggle primarily to get legalised and then fed and then educated and then have a decent work and living. The pattern that we mainly observe includes three behaviour categories;

a) Locals isolate immigrants

b) Immigrants create their own communities and avoid getting integrated

c) Immigrants isolate other immigrants

One Step Behind

A quite demonstrating example of the third case that stimulates most of the surprise is the following, a true story, happened in a Dance School in the heart of one of Europe's capitals;

there is this dance school in which there is a class for 4 – 7 year old children, to be taught ballet basics, group plays etc. One day, during the class, teacher ordered children to get held hand in hand in pairs in order to play a certain game. In this particular class, that day, there were 6 children, one from country A, one from country B, one from country C, one from country D and two locals. When the teacher gave the order, no child went to make pairs with the country D child, so the teacher gave a more specific order and said: “"Maria" go and make pairs with "Christina"”. Little Maria (the country C girl) didn’t go and so the teacher repeated once more. On the third time the teacher gave the order, and as we know it is the third of times on which people usually confess the real reason for not doing something instead of all excuses, little Maria answered : “No, Mrs, I don’t want to make pairs with "Christina", because she is from country D”.

A Step Forward - Project's Objectives

• help children understand, accept and respect cultural diversity on children sitting right next to them,
• bring school community and local society together, through their children
• let them discover by themselves differences and similarities, let them realise their common European identity
• introduce to European homes stories integrated in their own tradition,
• make children the vehicles that bring and establish home a kind of a new mentality towards occasional “foreigners” that will be – hopefully – adapted by adults as well,
• cultivate bounds among the institutions and schools participating that might develop to future initiatives
• produce original cultural products that will be involving the concept of mixing the cultures in a pan – European Context
• make children the role models for adults to follow,