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Doesn't make your place safe

#inmybed #documenta14 #kassel #beingsafeisscary #Banu Cennetoglus #memoryissoftware

Building Bridges

Let´s assume that money is some kind of energy, which can be used in many different ways. You can use it to build walls and fences, to buy weapons and vehicles. But you can also use it to build bridges and benches. Every bill of the Euro note displays a bridge. That is a very nice symbol.

I invite everyone to come up with an idea how the Euro bill might function as a bridge between the North and the South. Here are some ideas of my students:

- 3 guys are right now in Tansania. They have collected money to buy six sewing machines, which they will hand over to a group of women in Tansania so that they can make a living a send their kids to school.

- 6 students are preparing a campaign to raise money for goats in Uganda. These goats will be given to poor rural families so that they can raise more goats in order to pay the school fees for their children.

- Another team of students is working on a Micro-Loan-Project for female entrepreneurs in Uganda in order to foster small family businesses in rural areas.

What kind of bridge are you building right now?

What kind of bridge seems most necessary to your mind?

-Markus Kreikebaum

#beingsafeisscary #bridges #sciatebs #service learning #globalservicelearing #globalsouth #ebs

Perspective

#neon #artinallitsforms #beingsafeisscary #artoverload #modernart #kassel #art #documenta14 #artlovers #everythingbutdespair #perspective #lightart

Why being safe is scary

Being safe is usually associated with a feeling of security. We feel safe when we share the same opinion about others and about the world. However if we always stay in the same mental model of us, others and the world we cannot learn anything about others and ourselves and thus cannot grow.

We have to leave our social comfort zones in order to learn and grow personally as well as a society at large. Social Safety Zones are places where we feel at home, because the people around us share the same opinions and prejudgments about the world. They relieve us from the burden to think and judge for ourselves. We just have to agree to what everybody believes around us – and things will be all right. But there is nothing all right with confirming premature and preformed judgments about other groups of people, especially those with less privileges like the homeless, migrants, the handicapped or the elderly.

So whenever you are with a group of people and somebody makes some bad remarks about some other sort or group of people and everybody agrees, nods and smiles - you are probably in some sort of comfort zone and should be highly alerted and become frightened of this.

And it takes some courage to turn around sometimes.

Turning yourself around is the most valuable and anstonishing quality of human beings.

Try it out, do something different and reach out to people you do not know and maybe even are frightened of.

Let´s see what happens…

submitted by: Dr. Marcus Kreikebaum

#beingsafeisscary #ebslocal #ebs #servicelearning