Day 3

Many thoughts had to be moved around during the past few days of “DMSR”. To get our body on to that same level, we started the day off with a dance session. This helped the group to get energized and ready for the next theoretical input: The six thinking hats.

This technique, applied to group discussions, helps us making decisions by using all of our resources, such as Emotions (red hat), Creativity (green hat) or basic facts (white hat). Of course the participants were offered the chance to immediately try out this strategy with a present conflict. Everybody was able to take whatever hat they felt was fitting and express their thoughts. By using this method we were able to identify different standpoints and to come to a reasonable agreement on all of our discussed conflicts.

“I think it’s a useful tool to make group decisions because we are used to speaking with our red hat, our emotions. We need to have all hats in front of us to see the different options and to be aware of where our words are coming from.”
Evina, Greece

In the second half of the day we went back to networking and expressing ideas and plans for future projects that could possibly involve some or all of the attending organizations. We had the chance to learn even more about each other’s activities. Many propositions were made and it’s going to be exciting to see what comes out of them.

Next step was the Midterm-Evaluation. Each group came together to share their opinion on topics like the workshop, the hotel, the schedule and the food. Afterwards the results were restated for the facilitators.

In order to prepare for the intercultural night, we separated into groups based on our country. In these groups we prepared two sketches. One, showing the stereotypes of another country, which had been selected beforehand and two, presenting our own country the way we feel it is. With all preparations done, the sketches made a full circle and after each stereotypical play, the sketch representing the targeted countries “reality” was performed. This was followed by a discussion about similarities and differences in the presentations.

“It is a nice thing, because we get familiar with many cultures, and we saw some typical stereotypes. We made many connections but I think the best part was that we had a lot of fun.“
Iliyan, Gerogia

Dinner tonight was complemented by traditional foods from different countries and the night ended in the whole group learning and practicing bulgarian and greek folk dances.