Between Febraury and April of 2005, I participated on PEACE project. PEACE project is a project based on Exchange (PBox: Project that inculdes the participation of international Trainees of AIESEC), organized by AIESEC and with the support of the Millenium Campaign of the UNDP. The project took place in different cities and towns of Poland, and it couted with the participation of 29 Trainees from 23 different countries.

Peace Project was for me simply somthing amazing! I could explore all the talent I had working with people from other cultures, getting along with them and also travelling. Going from school to school (Every week for 7 weeks we visited a different a school) to teach about the Millenium Develpment Goals and culture was something that i didnt understand so much at the beginning......

At first sight, this project seems somehow superficial... but the thruth is that we as PEACErs created a lot of interess in different things, helping the world, getting to know other cultures, understanding people.. but the most important was to create interess around the topic of intercultural education.

Since PEACE project was part of the required 4 months traineeship i have to do in order to graduate, I also had to develope some research work around some PEACE topic. I choosed to talk about the importance of PEACE project in developing an intercultural environment and intercultural competences.

For this it was important to define first the following things:

- Intercultural education: Intercultural education is educational activity which fosters an undrstanding of the nature of culture, which helps the student develope skills in intercultural communication and which aids the student to view the world from perspectives other than ones own- Hoopes, D.S and Pusch, M.D.

-Intercultural competences: The intercultural competences are mainly two, Repect for the others, and respet for yourself; these two competences are divided in three categories: Cognitive Knowledge, Cognitive Skills and Affective Actitudes, Values and Emotional Factors Development.

With the activities we realized with the different classes we runned, we try to develope somehow this competences. I classified the activities we realized in the frame of the project in three: 1. Activities of Tolerance and Cultural Understanding; 2. Activities on Global Issues and 3. Activities involving MDGs promotion (millenium development goals).

But how does this relates to the competences!?

The objectives of the activities we realized speak by themselves... For example, as objectives of Tolerance and Cultural Understanding Activities we had: educating about what culture means for us, specially in our lifes; broading the world scope, looking for similarities and differences between Poland and our countries, showing our own cultures, educating about sterotipes how to identify them and how to break them, and motivating the students to go abroad. On the other hand, other activities objectives included, learning about human rights, achieving a basic understanding of global issues, relating problems with our personal lives.. etc. etc.

The question now.. is what do we actually want to achieve with educating about this and/or developing intercultural competences?

It is true that one of the biggest concernings of todays world is how to live with people of other cultures, and actually more than that, is how to avoid conflicts of ethnical, xenofobic and discrimantory order. The case of Paris is one of the clearest example of what can happen if we are not able to manage a multicultural situations in cities and countries. Multicultural spaces gives us, as humans an added value which is living within cultural diversity; but we can only see it as an added value if we actually work on looking to communicate recognizing the cultural differences that exist in our environment, not letting anyone forget that we own roots given by our national cultures.. and more important trying to understand actively other cultures, liberating ourselves from sterotipes, beeing receptive towards different cultures, allowing equal assigment of oppotunities and work places, beeing free from prejudices and inequality... and understanding difference as an enriching factor of the society.

When i read the paper one more time.. i realized that it is not only about cultures it self... it is more about being humans.... about respecting yourself and respecting others..just like the competences!.. Culture at the end is only one of the elements that make us different from others....