During our first few days, we talked about the Alligator Story, the story is about how is right or wrong in a situation. We had to make an agreement with the group and it was very challenging to do so, we had very different perspectives, the story has many different sides to look at and we have different values that we hold onto ourselves. However, this week we had an awesome opportunity with the Resource Center for Nonviolence. We did a task of choosing our most important values, there was a long list of options for us to choose from individually. Later on we were put into groups and received a task of coming up with the most important five values that we all agree. Due to the variety of the options we had, I was expecting a little bit of a debate and discussion about them; but surprisingly we did not have any of those.
There were three values that all of us have put on our lists so we easily agreed to pass on those three into our group lists. Then we only had two to choose from; everyone went around and said why they thought those values are important, it did not take us long to emphasize and come to the conclusion. This activity was very impressive. When every groups share their values, we had about 3 in common. One of them was “to have equal opportunity for all”. We had a really interesting discussion on that; is this value got chosen because of we are peacebuilders? would this value still get chosen if the task were given to the different group of people? or is this a universal value?
To conclude this activity, my group was the only group that has chosen “to live in a safe community”. The instructor asked us why, my group mate Lamis responded that she herself grew up in an unsafe community, and it is very hard to grow up and even harder to make a change for a better world. Education, health care and a lot of things might not be easily access to in those communities. This later leads to a mutual agreement on this value that it is extremely important and most people would not see it since it is something that is really easy for us to take for granted.
