CBM for Youth : Manuel and Hanna's Story

We are Manuel and Hanna, ASA-interns from Germany. ASA is a learning program for young people, dealing with political education, globalization issues and sustainability. Within this program we have been spending three months at CBM.

With the ASA program you spend three months at an organization as a tandem – together with another person you have only met twice during some preparation trainings. Our interests in Kosovo and CBM derive from various reasons: I, Hanna, studied European Studies and wrote my Master Thesis about an Albanian NGO, I had spent a voluntary service with before. Since then, I always wanted to go back to the Balkans and work in the field of reconciliation. Me, Manuel, studying Media Science, engaged in the displaying of the Yugoslav Wars in film, wanted to get to know the people and mindsets in post-conflict areas like Kosovo. Therefore, it was very interesting for us to experience how people deal with the past and moreover, there are a lot of more issues, especially economic ones, the inhabitants face every day.

Although Kosovo lies geographically in the middle of Europe, German people do not know a lot about the country – neither about the neighboring countries. Currently, as the so called refugee crisis takes place, the Balkans is receiving a bit more attention. After Kosovo has been declared to be a “safe country of origin” the wave of immigrants from Kosovo who had arrived in the EU since the beginning of the year, had to go back again. Since then, in the German media the interest in the country has declined again. Therefore, not all of our friends and families understood why we went here. Except for my interest deriving from my studies and for the nice memories I have, it was indeed hard to tell what we were supposed to do here at a local NGO, in such a “complicated” city, whose political circumstances we did and still do not understand in detail, and neither know any Serbian or Albanian language. It is especially somehow strange to come here for a couple of months and leave again, whereas for our local peers, due to visa politics, it is never that easy to do an internship abroad.

Here at CBM, after thinking about several projects for a while, we finally came up with the idea to give a workshop on entrepreneurship and business building for students. We are no entrepreneurs ourselves; however, we had the opportunity to take part in a training course on entrepreneurship in Croatia and wanted to share what we have learned with students from Mitrovica. As there are so many young people in Kosovo, there is a high potential of creative and innovative business ideas. We considered it a good idea to motivate young people to think big and to take use of their potentials.

Besides this workshop, we organized one project, “New Ways of waste”, with the “Access Group Program”: we taught the students about environmental protection and cleaned the nature around Zvecan Castle. Moreover, we took part in a conference “The Role of Universities in Dealing with the Past” at University Prishtina and supported CBM with archiving and PR.

We are happy that we had the opportunity to get an insight into CBM’s work, to meet cool and interesting people and exchange ideas with them during these three months. Tomorrow, we will leave Mitrovica, with our heads full of thoughts and impressions. We want to thank everyone in Mitrovica for their hospitality and for the good time we have had.