Summer volunteer camp “Multiculture through ages” Brody, 2012

In dates 21 of July till 04 of august there run the summer international volunteer camp in Brody (Lviv region). This project was organised by NGO Union Forum, set in Lviv in 1991. In cooperation with local Museum and thanks to help of international volunteers, during two weeks we did great work about arranging of old cemetery, which belongs to XIX century. Volunteers from France, Netherlands, Poland and Ukraine were cleaning old graves from plants and even managed to found some monuments covered with grass and ground half hidden into ground.

The idea of the project which is called “Multiculture through ages”, is to promote history of a small town on the local level first of all and make people aware about their own past. The expected outcomes are that inhabitants of the town will be involved in such actions and will join with voluntary help to recreate important places of their own memory or even create their own projects, to implement some great ideas about developing and promoting their ukrainian identity.

This is the first step towards changing of the way of thinking and relation to the problem of identity and cultural heritage. That’s why in plans for next project there is idea to join pupils from local schools for such social activities – to make young people aware of how important is their contribution into local cultural life.

The outcomes of the first year were quite great – promotional on the local level – newspapers and television, happy volunteers, who left Ukraine with positive memories, visible amount of work, which we’ve done and thankful responses of inhabitants! That’s really great experience!

Actually such kind of projects is the way how modern youth open the world, and explore a new countries and cultures! From the other side this is doing thing which show us how just few people in few days can contribute to the whole community, then the question follow – how much can do the whole community, when unite it’s potential?!

The state of cultural heritage in most small towns in Ukraine are in really poor conditions, that’s one of the reason we choosed rural area for our project - to announce the problem in order to prevent futher distorsion of common intercultural heritage which appeared to be a part of ukrainian history.

So, now more details about how the camp run:

We met in Lviv on 21 June, and spend here a wonderful day walking around the city and hiding in cafes from the rain... Openminded and quite curious, we just started to share our experiences and ideas.
Next day we traveled to Brody – place where the camp should run. It was Sunday, still was raining – but it didn’t make us sad – we had cozy place to stay in, and were expecting good weather for the next day.
And on Monday we started to work... sometime we were like “hardworkers” cutting bushes and working with ax, sometimes we were like archeologists, finding out of the ground interesting artefacts, like linguists we were trying to read inscriptions, written on the monuments on different languages. We pretend even to be historians time to time, while discussing past event, which could took part in this town, and fates of people, who used to live here... we spend like this 2 weeks putting our strenght and energy to get such a good result – during this time 9 of us arranged around 100 monuments!

As well we were preparing catalogue for the monuments which we found under the grass and leaves or sometimes literally from the ground. But compare to the whole territory of the cemetery we did just a small part of what could be done! Sure there are much more interesting things hidden in the oblivion and indifference. But as far we strongly expect for changes!

To make some logical conclusion, should say that small contribution of every responsible person can make the whole society to change and develope. Our attitude to own history is who we are. So let’s make a challenge, let’s recreate the memory! Coordinator of the project Anna Zharkivska