As participants in an educative program organized by Humanity in Action Poland, we had a great time during the event called “World for Breakfast”. We had an unforgettable opportunity to show our ability to lead a group of young people and to teach them something new regarding human rights. Doing so, we tried to share our knowledge with them and to educate them in human rights by presenting different characters like June Jordan, Vaclav Havel, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Irena Sendler, as well as Shirin Ebadi. The idea was to teach them about these important human rights personalities and use this new knowledge in a short educational game. As the name of our organization suggests, our goal was to, quite literally, put humanity into action; by doing so, our aim was to take our knowledge and experience and share both of these with the future generation. Firstly, we spent a wonderful time with them preparing breakfast in multicultural groups speaking different languages. This first contact shows us how curious about the world, smart, and funny these children were. And then we were sure that we really wanted to share with them our desire to help others, to understand different problems concerning human rights and make them start to thinking about this topic.
After this first interaction we invited them to participate in a quiz during which they could learn new information concerning human rights. It was an important moment for all of us because this educational game was based on our idea and we were supposed to lead these young people. Some of us presented the profile of people fighting for human rights, others split up into groups with children to assist them in the game. We really enjoyed both spending time together and sharing knowledge. I think that we were all very excited with the idea of leading and teaching children, who were only a few years younger than us. I was also surprised by the behavior of girls from Pro Futuro Gimnasium. They were really embarrassed and shy because of our presence even if their level of English was as good as the boys’ level. Maybe next time we should be more attentive and try to encourage them to participate more fully. This experience allowed also us to take a step back in time and recall what it was like for all of us when we were pupils in school.
