Being Different Doesn’t Mean Being Worse

Sources of Tolerance (ST) is the name of a summer camp that for the third year in a row has hosted children and teenagers representing various ethnic groups, so that they can communicate freely, familiarize themselves with various cultures, and learn to respect different customs and traditions. Sources of Tolerance was founded through the dedicated efforts of the Congress of Ethnic Minorities of Ukraine (CEMU); the project was sponsored by the Ministry of Family and Youth, Congress of Ethnic Communities of Ukraine, Eurasian Jewish Congress, Brenkford Co., and the political bloc Our Ukraine. CEMU Vice President Yosyp Zysels is particularly solicitous of the camp. This year’s camp manager Natalia Bakulina, a research fellow with the Ethnic Minorities Laboratory at the Institute of Pedagogy of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of Ukraine, told The Day about the camp’s features. One of the main laws at the international camp reads, “Being different does not mean being worse.”

The camp was organized on the grounds of the Young Guard Children’s Center, in Luzanivka (Odesa). Among the happy campers are children from Ukraine’s sixteen ethnic communities: Belarusians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Jews, Hungarians, Romanians, Moldovans, Armenians, Germans, Poles, Crimean Tatars, Tatars, Lithuanians, Estonians, Russians, and Ukrainians (totaling 160). These were divided into 8 units, each made up of children representing various ethnic groups, with three instructors from the Moldovan, Ukrainian, and Hungarian ethnic communities. The camp staff included psychologists, who monitored the tolerance formation process, registering the slightest changes in children’s behavior.

Camp manager Natalia Bakulina says, “We make every effort to help them understand and to demonstrate that being different is neither a vice or crime. On the contrary, such distinctions make life more exciting and diversified, whereas xenophobia excludes tolerance, respect for, and even empathy with a fellow human who is different in any way.”

Postgraduates, teachers, musicians, ethnographers, historians, and psychologists worked at the camp. No one was indifferent or unprofessional, as evidenced by the meticulous arrangements for this extremely sophisticated international rest camp. The organizers and teaching staff did not arrive empty-handed, and no one relied on improvisation or intuition. All the children and teenagers were supplied with multilingual dictionaries and songbooks; the instructor in charge of choreography was equipped with a reference tool, Collection of Ethnic Dances; the Physical Training instructor, with the Collection of Traditional Outdoor Games (the sports program relies on ethnic-based games). Other reference sources include an important one entitled Collection of Ethnic Cooking Recipes, which was used by the cooking staff; borshch and pyrohy were served on Ukraine Day; lavash (white bread in the form of a flat cake, common to the Caucasus and Asian countries), and brynza sheep’s milk cheese, special spices, etc., on Armenia Day. There was also a collection of descriptions, drawings, and illustrations entitled Handicrafts, meant for the camp’s ethnic crafts hobby/study group.

All these reference sources and dictionaries are part of the Methods, a special program developed by experts involved in the rest camp project. This is a sizable collection of guidelines, including chapters such as Camp Work Methods, Psychology and Rules of Communications, Ethnocultural Panorama of Ukraine, Our Ukrainian State, with chapters containing information about every ethnic group in Ukraine — e.g., language, history, traditional cultural symbols, famous personalities, children’s writers, and pages devoted to tragic histories. The Methods include world calendar systems, old alphabets, and a concise dictionary of folkloric terminology. The final chapter contains the texts of the Declaration of Rights of Ethnic Minorities of Ukraine, the Law of Ukraine “On the Ethnic Minorities,” the Council of Europe’s minority rights convention, and other data with which the children were acquainted (although the Methods reference work is in Ukrainian, Russian was regrettably the camp’s working language).

The Methods was prepared and produced in a remarkably meticulous and professional way, utilizing numerous modern teaching techniques (situation modeling, critical thinking, simulating and dramatizing situations, working on a team and two-person basis, etc.), describing the specifics of communication with children representing various ethnic groups, and civilized methods of discussion. Without a doubt, the Methods, developed specially for the Sources of Tolerance Camp, should appear in print as a reference source for educational and recreational establishments catering to children of different ethnic backgrounds. Needless to say, the problem of interethnic understanding remains acute. The camp’s basic method consists in getting children interested in learning more about other ethnic cultures.

The National Days were the quintessence of camp life. Each ethnic group had its own day celebrated at the Common Home, a spacious hall where ethnic groups took turns preparing the celebration. Starting on the previous evening, a particular group would decorate a Holy Circle, gather wood for the campfire, and lay the tables. The children decorated the walls with folk crafts, ethnic symbols, and portraits of noted personalities. Each National Day would begin with the national anthem, followed by ethnic festivities. Morning exercises would be performed at the Common Home to the accompaniment of ethnic music befitting the occasion. The children were supplied with small dictionaries, each containing 15-20 entries, so that they could communicate in a given language. The cooks prepared traditional dishes and the hosting children explained them to the guests. Classes given later in the day dealt with pertinent ethnic traditions, taught in the form of games, as well as folk crafts (e.g., on Tatar Day, traditional slippers were sewn, larks molded, while Easter eggs were painted on Ukraine Day). On a particular National Day, everyone at the camp learned to sing an ethnic song or dance. The hosting children felt like true celebrities, receiving guests, and recounting their traditions, games, and holidays. The guests would try to see the world through the eyes of people representing different traditions, religions, and ethnic groups. For the first time in their lives, some children grasped the simple truth that their ethnic groups were not the only people inhabiting this world. Every National Day ended in a gala concert involving the whole camp, complete with a discotheque and dancing to ethnic music.

For each group of children, National Day marked the highlight of their stay at the camp. Children brought their traditional costumes, flags, symbols, and toys; they developed skits and tried to devise something especially interesting. Thus, the Ukrainian campers’ exhibit featured a seventeenth century Kyiv-Mohyla Academy curriculum. Mr. Bosy, an expert on Trypillian culture, made a very tangible contribution to the festive event, in the form of a display of ancient artifacts that he had personally unearthed in his grandfather’s kitchen garden. He also played a pipe discovered in the age-old Trypillian soil.

On Tatar Day, guests stepping into the Common Home removed their shoes and sat on the floor covered with a large cloth and were served coffee halvah. The hosting Tatar children showed their respect for the guests by wiping the dust off their shoes and lining them up, toes first, by the entrance, so that it would be convenient for everyone to put them on before leaving.

Even though no special emphasis was placed on religion, one way or another every ethnic group broached its church tradition. Thus, a Tatar boy showed the guests exactly how to perform a traditional Muslim prayer. On Transfiguration Day (Spas), the Ukrainians treated every guest to apples, honey, and Ukrainian dishes. The Germans demonstrated some Catholic rites. (Incidentally, the Polish children used every occasion to attend a divine service at Odesa’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, but the rest of the children refused to visit churches and mosques.)

According to Natalia Bakulina, a National Day’s success largely depended on how well the children had been prepared for the occasion at home. In view of this, the organizing committee had contacted various ethnic communities in Ukraine, asking them to make the necessary arrangements, so that the children would arrive duly tutored and equipped; the committee also asked that children with a satisfactory degree of sociability, talent, and enthusiasm be selected, so that they could fittingly represent their ethnic heritage. (This year, only two groups proved unprepared for, even indifferent to, their ethnic presentations: the Russians and Belarusians).

Commenting on the camp’s results, camp manager Natalia Bakulina was gratified to note, “The important point is that the children began independently to notice things that were common or similar in various ethnic cultures — in choreography, cooking, traditional symbols, folk crafts, needlework, or toys. They were constantly comparing their games, primers, and differences in national costumes. Yet not all methodological problems have been resolved to date. It’s important to develop approaches when discussing with children such complicated issues as tragedies in ethnic histories. Here you must think not twice but a hundred times, so that the tragic mistakes of the past will never influence the future. One example is Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s role in Ukrainian history: for obvious reasons Ukrainians and Jews may well interpret it differently. The same is true of the age-old relations between the Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians, let alone the longstanding Ukrainian- Russian differences and mutual grievances. Every country, all nations face similar problems, viewed from today’s standpoints. And so, in preparing for the next season, we are planning a roundtable to deal with such issues. We’ll invite historians, teachers, and psychologists to join it.”

Mixed families constitute another problem that must be resolved when running a multinational children’s rest camp. How is the parentage of a boy or girl, whose mother is Ukrainian and father Hungarian, to be determined? There are cultures, particularly the Jewish one, where traditions dictate exactly how to identify with your mother or father; also what language to consider your mother tongue, what habits, literature, even travels you should prefer. In this sense, being bilingual is perhaps the best option. This problem will also be included in next year’s Sources of Tolerance program.

Natalia Bakulina focused on another scenario: “What was really bad — and we couldn’t do anything about it — was the status of the Young Guard youth complex, where our camp was housed. It was once a major Soviet recreational center. The site was a shambles: dirty premises, broken furniture, beds with dirty linen. It was horrible, especially considering the fantastic surroundings, with rich vegetation, an excellent beach, and an ancient structure (former Count Luzanov’s mansion) that had miraculously survived the ravages of time. No one seems to need any of this now.”

The closing ceremony at Sources of Tolerance was an impressive event culminating in a gala concert, with every ethnic group singing its national songs. Every participant was issued a diploma acknowledging the bearer’s specific contribution to interethnic community life. The encouraging sign was that a number of senior campers said they wanted to work as camp personnel or probation instructors.

The Methods, which is used as a handbook by the camp’s instructors, personnel, and children of various ethnic groups, starts with the Declaration of Principles on Tolerance, adopted by the UNESCO General Conference in 1995. It reads, in part: “Tolerance is respect, acceptance, and appreciation of the rich diversity of our world’s cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being human. It is fostered by knowledge, openness, communication, and freedom of thought, conscience, and belief. Tolerance is harmony in difference.” The founders and staff of Sources of Tolerance seek to act in accordance with precisely these principles, and they feel optimistic about the results of their work. CEMU Vice President Yosyp Zysels believes that “the children left the camp, aware that God created us different in terms of character, temperament, and ethnic origin. Yet this does not mean that some may be considered better and others worse. Our Lord, in His wisdom, created a varied world. Our task is to preserve this diversity and convince our children that every other human being is equal to you, that you must accept others the way they are, with their traditions, habits, and temperaments; that you must not impose your ways on them. That’s the secret of our democratic future.”

The Congress of Ethnic Minorities of Ukraine is seeking partners to help expand the Sources of Tolerance project in order to establish an extensive network of such tolerance camps all over Ukraine. ST instructors — and more importantly, their pupils — will be able to run such camps and share their experience with other enthusiasts.