A New International Project

Everything connected with this project began exactly a month ago when Vahram Toqmajyan introduced Lesley Diaz, a teacher from the USA, to our English speaking club. She expressed her willingness to carry out an international project which is called "Untold Stories: International Peace Project". The power and peaceful character of the project is revealed by frank and simple stories about dreams, preferences, close relations of teenagers living in different countries having different political structures and religion beliefs. These stories are not usually told aloud: they remain untold. Instead, all the mass media means throughout the world are full of materials disseminating official visits of the leaders of big and small countries, politicians' ambiguous analyses which are very often too challenging to be comprehensive, threats to one another, upcoming sanctions, unnecessary details of some crimes, and in many cases a fake world public opinion about a definite state or peoples living there is created. Our new project can show that teenagers living in different countries have almost the same dreams, preferences, future professions and almost the same standards of frankness. A question arises: Why are you so different, adults? At what age did you start to accumulate hatred and differ from one another? You are all struggling for the realization of the dreams of your new generation, aren't you? And these dreams do not differ from one another almost everywhere.

Let's return to the core content of the project. It involves the following cities: Tehran, Rome, Kathmandu, Yerevan, Berlin and Salzburg. The schoolchildren of these five cities answer the same questions. The questions are not political. The questions are about the learners' preferences, educational environment, personal interests and hobbies, dreams. The working language of the project is English. The participants: 10 learners from one school from each country. The final product of the project is expected to be a film which will present the interviews taken from the learners and their presentations. The film will be shown in different languages and in different countries. The first stage of the project has already been carried out in Tehran and is going on in other cities. The English speaking club members of the Educomplex will be the participants from Yerevan. The project coordinators Lesley Diaz (USA) and Khashayar (Iran) have taken part in our club lessons three times already, and they have carried out preparatory work. The shooting of the film is expected to be either on the 15th or 17th of December.