by Pelham Lindfield Roberts (Head of College)
The 21 September every year is the UN Day of Peace known as "Peace
One Day". This fitted our schedule well as we worked through our mission
on the final two days of celebrations with a day of engagement about
"peace" on the 21st and a day of engagement about "sustainability" on
the 22nd September.
The events started with an
introductory session on Peace defining it as "social justice" rather
than simply as the "absence of war", or the "absence of direct physical
violence".
After this Mahindra students
presented 7 workshops on various conflicts from around the world ranging
from conflicts over land to conflicts about culture and language and
identity.
We had a skype interaction with UWC Mostar focussing on the role of education in addressing conflict and we linked up with Saim Saeed a
former student from Pakistan who had been at UWC Mahindra College in
2008 when the terrorist attacks occurred. The head pledged to work
towards securing visas for Pakistani studnets to return to the college.
Finally
students engaged in an interesting workshop, used in other UWC's,
entitled "Red Team / Blue Team" to discover their desire to be
competitive or collaborative. The workshops were facilitated by student
volunteers and revealed some interesting issues and challenges.
The day was a fitting way to celebrate 50 Years of UWC!
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