“We have laid the cornerstone in the architecture of peace of a new era.”
This is how Jelena Stefanovic, a teacher from an elementary school in Kragujevac, commented on the visit of 23 students to the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo.
Sixth and seventh-grade elementary school students came to Sarajevo on the initiative of their teachers.
Stefanovic, along with other teachers from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), participated in a workshop last year where the importance of peace education in schools was sought to be brought closer through the educational methodology of the War Childhood Museum and its exhibits.
The organizer of the workshops is the Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Serbia (YIHR) in partnership with the Forum ZFD (Ziviler Friedensdienst).
The War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo is a museum that preserves thousands of personal items such as photographs, letters, notebooks, documents, and other memories of those who spent their childhood during the war in BiH.
What do the children say?
“The children were very happy. They liked Sarajevo, the atmosphere was wonderful, and the impressions exceeded our expectations,” says Sofija Todorovic, program director of the YIHR in Serbia.
“They went through the museum, talked about the exhibits, wrote down their impressions, so we had a conversation about which story they liked the most, why it is important, connecting it with their personal feelings they experienced as children,” she added.
After visiting the museum, children from Kragujevac also visited some of the most prominent buildings in Sarajevo.
“We continue our work with teachers and classes in BiH and Serbia, we will work to have even more visits. If anyone from BiH would like to come to Serbia, I encourage people to contact us, and we will help with that,” Todorovic concluded, Slobodna Evropa reports.
E.Dz.
