Day 2. Our World: Democracies, Countries, Languages. Our Rights and Responsibilities

An electric guitar solo awakened us this morning and we quickly emerged from our cabins for morning exercises including stretching and a game called fishnet.

Our theme today was “Democracies, Countries, Languages, and our Rights and Responsibilities.” After a tasty breakfast together, we began creating a Tree of Knowledge with green paper leaves on which we wrote the questions we hoped would be answered through today’s speakers and activities. Later in the day, if we’d learned the answer to our questions, we replaced the leaf with the answer we’d written on a colorful flower-shaped paper. We hope that by the end of camp, our tree will be in full bloom as our questions are answered and we add new facts to the tree.

As we mentioned in yesterday’s blog post, we created personalized envelopes for our camp post office; today, we picked our secret pal from a hat and will sneak notes and treats into their envelope until identities are revealed on the final day of camp.

What is a democracy? If a country has “democratic” or “republic” in its name, does that mean it’s a democracy? NO! We looked at a variety of countries and their flags and identified which are democracies (direct or representative) and which are not.

To learn more about each other’s countries, we played a variation of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” The four-way tie ended in a playoff!

One of the more challenging activities of the day for many of us was learning common phrases in five languages: English, Lithuanian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Belarusian! This was easier for the multilingual among us. We hit the basketball courts with footballs (soccer balls to the Americans) and used those to mark our progress across the court as we tested our memory skills trying to remember and pronounce the phrases in all those languages!

We were honored by a visit from a longtime Lithuanian staff member of the US Embassy, a diplomat from the Embassy, and a Lithuanian Fulbright Scholar alumna from Harvard University, Monika Rogers, who is an expert in 20th century Lithuanian history, particularly its three occupations (Soviet-Nazi-Soviet), periods of resistance and rebuilding, and the generational collective trauma that remains embedded in the culture. The Embassy’s Cultural Attache Mojib Ghaznawi, whose parents are Russian and Afghani immigrants to the USA, spoke about the importance of bringing one’s authentic self to the world and demonstrated this by playing his favorite instrument – a flute – and snippets of his favorite musical genres, classical Afghani and hip-hop. He told us that as part of expressing democratic values, we should be able to be whoever we are (regardless of religion, race, sexual identity, hobbies, etc.) and be respectful of others, even when they might be different from us.

Late afternoon, we learned about the history of the post-WWII Declaration of Human Rights, and discussed the rights we think are most important and the responsibility of each of us to to support human rights as much as we can. We know how to identify the four roles that lead to abuses and protections of human rights: perpetrators, victims, bystanders, and upstanders. We want to be upstanders and stand up for the victim when we hear or read (such as on social media) of language or actions that demean others and that create a dehumanizing us/them situation.

This evening, we learned about ancient legends of our countries and, in small groups, prepared skits to illustrate each. A squawking eagle and a howling wolf just might have stolen the show!

A final activity was breaking into groups to create camp symbols. The final symbol will be published in tomorrow’s blog, so be sure to click on that link tomorrow.