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!