“Make it Green”, it is a one-month experience of daily community life that take place during the summer in a School in Tramonti, Italy. It’s very challenging living everyday with this beautiful view of the mountains in front of you and the constant reminder of the beach being so close. That for the postcard, but the most difficult part is to live in a community and communicate with each other.
To do that, we participate in workshops and some games to break the ice and with time the group became pretty solid. You can see how it appears in the personality of everyone and how it’s evolved with the time that has gone by. The goal is to become more confident and more environmentally conscious during the project. At the end we became like a little family.
But as it is in every community there is some affinity and some opposition and for this reason you have to find your way through the group. We did that by going on trips together we went to the beach in Maiori and to the beautiful Amalfi that is near the place where we live. As a group, we visited Pompei, the ancient city and its ruins, and we were also in Napoli which is really different than the natural place between the mountains where we live. Overall, when you have these experiences with each other I think it becomes easy to be part of a community. It’s also about cooking and cleaning in a daily basis, but this is not my topic so I’m not going to delve deeper into this. We had to be organized inside this project. For that, we divided the tasks with a schedule and everything is going well with this method so far. It’s a task of commitment and sometimes it might be tiring but after that you have some free time it becomes easier and before you know it is done and another team takes the lead.
People come from every country in Europe, and every age (18 to 30), so multiculturalism is promoted strongly and mostly by the cultural nights that we have during the weeks. You prepare a dinner with a typical plate from your country and try to perform a party with some elements of your own culture. It’s a way to meet other people’s cultures. That means also to meet the origin and the identity of each people in each culture. Who they really are, in a way. For example, the Italian night was an occasion to taste nice food that were made with local products and drink good wine with a lot of dances in a happy atmosphere and really understand the Italian culture.
It’s also a promotion of diversity as different countries come together to live as a community and have to adapt to each other’s way of living. We had volunteers from Greece, Portugal, France, Romania, Croatia, Italy, Turkey and Georgia. Everyone was really active and participating in their own way despite all their cultural differences, political backgrounds and difference in character. And you can see how these differences between them brought them actually closer by the end of the project.
Our goal focuses on doing some activities with artistic context and also with sustainable ecological and social value that will benefit the community. We cleaned many paths full of garbage in the mountain, and we tried to make people more responsible and aware of the necessity of ecology. We promote that by art and signs that we put throughout the paths of the mountain because no one was really aware or active enough but thankfully with the help of the association and the project we managed to make a start to a cleaner Tramonti. It’s also a way to promote and make this place more attractive by using signs for tourists that want to come here and hike through the paths. These signs promote values that we want people to adopt and use them to make their home a better place. To say “no you don’t throw you’re trash here”. The mountain belongs to the nature not to human dirtiness. It’s sad in a way to see the beautiful landscape of Tramonti and how the people in generally treat it. A lot of people don’t care about ecology and just put their garbage in the nature. It’s shows how projects like “make it green” can be really useful to nature and the community.
During the project we also had the goal to paint and renovate the school for the children that are here during the year. We worked with a local artist, Stefano that harmonized and directed all our drawing to make the school better for the children. We had to help renovate the school by painting the wall and we hope that this art project will stimulate the imagination of the kids.
We all lived this month with the impression of being children and in school again. With the “dringgg” of the school bell for a wakeup call the breakfast and some games to energize ourselves we start our days like we did a long time ago. We had Italian lessons from local volunteers that were teaching us in a very fun and energetic way and they were really sociable and full of life. The workshops that we did they serve the purpose to educate people to certain values and how-to live in a community which is also promoted by our video team and social media team with a lot of pictures videos and communication between us. This community life has a little gossip about events and life inside the group that can appear inside every community. It’s a way to promote and express the feelings of everyone by art. Some people write, some take pictures, some make videos, some are dancing. This place was a healthy place for me, where I was able to change the darkness in my mind and feel better. This project promotes expression through art.
Unfortunately, that of course differs between each culture and that can create some barriers between people and between the group. The games and workshops are also a way to avoid that. But we can’t change the nature of everyone and touch the identity of everyone. We try to open those walls by promoting ecology and diversity. But despite everything by the end of the project, we were all closer together, it was successful and the awkwardness had disappeared with time.
The coordinator team is welcoming and do their best to create this environment in the group about the needs of everyone being covered. The thing that really became known to us is that Italian people like to eat good food. Cooking is really big factor in this project. Italian people are very welcoming, and this project was for me the possibility to be reconnected with my emotions and the nature. It was a natural therapy in some way and it changed my bad habits by being included in the activities. The privacy is a complex question in the school because we live all together but it remains an experience and you learn also to adapt yourself with the needs of others. I will end on a positive note, because before coming here I wasn’t really on my best mood. And now everything is much better. The physical activities that we had and the hiking was also a way to feel better. It’s really an immersive experience that you learn a lot about yourself and others and all by living together as a community.
