About a year ago, when we were in the first year of Bachillerato*, we began this project. We were a group of 22 students who formed a team to develop a service-learning project. We were united in our desire to help in the integration of migrants. We began this adventure never imagining that our small grain of sand could win us the National Prize for Immigration and Coexistence 2020 for the project “Pamplona, open city”, awarded by the Spanish Network for Service-Learning.
From its beginning, the project was divided into three phases: learning, action and communication. We began with a training course about migration and refugee issues, guided by our Service-Learning teacher, Josemari Aymerich, and by Irene Beccarini, then a novice in the Society of the Sacred Heart. The material provided by the NGO Alboan** with its Change project was very useful for us; as with that we learned a lot about migration, the mourning of migrants and the sensations and feelings that arise in the people who live through this experience.
The second phase was to move on to action; we did not wish to stay at the level of theory and we wanted to have an influence on our surroundings, to make our city, Pamplona be a real place of welcome. To achieve this, we began to raise awareness among the students in our school. In particular we wanted to achieve this among our companions in 1st Year Bachillerato and with the students in 2nd year of ESO.*** We wanted them to put themselves into the shoes of a migrant, to realise the difficulties, fears and adversities that they have to go through and to evoke empathy among them.
We did not want to stop at just learning about migration theory, or promoting an awareness campaign in the school; we wanted to go a step further and get to know at first-hand the migrants living in our city. We got in touch with different associations, notably the SEI (Intercultural Social and Educational Service), a small organization which had just relocated to within walking distance of the school and which is dedicated to working with migrant adolescents. Our first contact with them was to go to a talk where they explained to us the weekly activities that they organize; they told us that every Friday they organized different activities depending on the interests of each young person in the association. We decided to join the Friday sports group; we met at the SEI headquarters and did different workshops related to sport and the values of group work. The activities were varied. We began with basketball and football games, and various other activities and we finished with a very enjoyable costume party. The importance of these activities lay in getting to know each other and building up relationships, even though we were very different people, and had had very different lives, but who shared the desire to get to know each other and to learn from each other.
