Lillehammer

For the past few days, I've been staying at the Nansen Academy in Lillehammer, Norway (a few hours North of Oslo) to learn about the Nansen Dialogue Network, to meet students from the Western Balkans and Caucasus regions that will also be attending the International Summer School, and to feed off the wisdom of a burly, bearded Norwegian man named Steinar Bryn, the Project Director of the Nansen Academy. Bryn has dedicated his entire life to cultivating peace between feuding peoples, specifically those in the ex-Yugoslavian countries of Serbia, Kosovo, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia. He frequently travels across Eastern Europe to facilitate dialogue between those who literally hate each other. Instead of debating facts, numbers, and lives lost, those involved talk and dialogue with each other and learn that their experiences are not so different from one another. In this way, the Nansen Dialogue Network creates peace in the midst of conflict. 

The single best thing that I've been able to do this week is to look around a circle of people....and not see one other person from my own country. In the middle of a discussion yesterday about our own willingness to dialogue with those our own countries are in conflict with, I looked up at those surrounding me. A Macedonian named Biljana, a Croatian named Marija, Annette from Serbia, and myself. Have you ever been in a conversation as the sole American? It makes you feel especially great when you get things like "I thought you all would be stupid and fat!" or, even more sobering, "It seems like you have a lot to be ashamed of in your history."

I've also had time to explore quaint Lillehammer- below is a picture from the top of the city's ski jump that was built for the 1994 Winter Olympics. I've been on a few walks around the city, to the movie theater, and to the Maihaugen Museum where we celebrated Midsummer's Night Eve by gathering around Breisjøen Lake and watching a traditional fire lighting ceremony.

 

Tomorrow we leave for Oslo, where I will spend the next six weeks of my summer. I couldn't be more excited!

Traveler's Prologue

In less than one week, I will be leaving the familiarity of Minneapolis to begin my summer in Norway at the University of Oslo's International Summer School! For the majority of the seven weeks abroad, I will be taking a Scandinavian Government and Politics course and participating in a peace seminar twice a week with nine other peace scholars from the Midwest (we all received the same scholarship to travel to Norway). The ten of us leave from Minneapolis on June 19th and, after a brief layover in Reykjavik, Iceland, travel to Lillehammer (host of the '94 Winter Olympics) to participate in a week long seminar called The Nansen Dialogue. The Nansen Dialogue happens every year one week prior to the start of summer courses in Oslo. It serves as an analysis and healing process for enrolled summer school students that come from the Caucas region that have been impacted by conflicts and wars after the fall of the Soviet Union. The seminar allows students from countries that may have been in previous opposition with each other to talk about their experiences and relate to one another. The goal is to find common ground among the anger and hostility that these students may feel towards each other. Why have myself and nine other Americans been invited to these dialogues? I wish I knew! I suppose that's all for a future blog post.


There are several trips that the summer school offers throughout the term ("excursions" is what the University calls them...cute). I'll have a chance to do hiking, water rafting, and a reindeer safari in Jotunheimen, a visit to the Oslo Fjord, and a trip to see the beautiful landscape of Telemark, a county described as the heart of Norwegian culture. We also have a long four day weekend in the middle of July that students can use to do whatever they wish. My eyes are set on Dublin. More to come on that.


When I traveled to Namibia and South Africa last fall, people there would ask me what I had thought of the two countries before I left and what I believed my experience would be like. And I could never quite give them a satisfying answer. To be honest, I don't like to do much digging into the places that I go to before I leave. An experience without preconceived notions almost always leads to a disappointment-free affair. You can't be let down by something that you had no amount of expectation for. Personally, I feel more open to the things that I see and people I meet if I leave my own judgement at home. Having said that, one must know some background about their destination to avoid becoming that stereotypical image of the annoying American traveler. I hear that Norway's one of the most expensive places in the world that I could go. There's 18 hours of daylight in the summer. The fjords are something like paradise. And if, heaven forbid, I ever need a place to stay besides my own dorm room, I've got the Svanoes, the Ouses, and about 18 other relatives of Minnesota friends that can house me in the greater Scandinavian area.


I'm excited and happy and feel incredibly lucky to have seven weeks to explore a new part of the world. I'll try to be a reliable blogger and friend while I'm gone, so keep checking back for new posts in the coming weeks :)