Our Visit to Belarus

Today it’s very common for young people to travel in Europe. Perhaps it’s not so common to visit Belarus, but our teacher wanted us to go there. The past six months we have prepared for our trip to Belarus. We have been studying history, politics and social relations. The 15th of May it was finally time to make the one-week journey and our expectations were high. We thought we knew what to expect, but our picture of how Belarus would be like didn’t agree with real life. We didn’t think that they would be so hospitable as they were and we thought that they had worse economy than they actually had. We lived in families in a village called Cokol, which is a suburb to Minsk.

It’s really difficult to summarize what we have been through, because we have experienced so much in a short period of time. Some things we will remember for a long time, for example: the talented students, the ballet and the families we lived in.

School
We had a special day when we could visit some lessons and see how the students work.
Our first impression of the school was that it looks like a Swedish school forty years ago.
The classrooms have blackboards and small benches that are held together with the chairs. The school is an esthetic school were the students for example are learning how to dance, paint, play instruments, make typical Belarusian handicrafts and learn about Belarus.
  One thing we found interesting was that they didn’t use any calculators to count hard mathematical problems. We had a little competition with them, but we didn’t have a chance to compete with their knowledge.
  Two things we reacted on were that they have to stand up when they shall answer a question and that they don’t get any lunch, only a piece of bread and a cup of tea.
 Their school system is not like ours. They have six schooldays a week and their scale of marks are divided into five numbers, 1 to 5. Next year they will have 10 marks and only five schooldays.
 Their headmaster is taking an active part in the students’ work, like arranging concerts so the students can show their skills. We are grateful to him, because he had organized all of our daily activities very well. He had arranged a bus for us that we could travel with to our educational visits.

Families When we came to Cokol, we where placed in different families. We were supposed to live with them for the whole week. They showed us great hospitality and they did everything to make us feel at ease. It was very interesting to live with them, because we exchanged information about our countries and we experienced their daily routines. An unusual thing for us was that their friends’ parents invited us to supper, even though we were like 10 people.

Our host families youngsters.

A thing that surprised us was their mealtimes. They ate breakfast at 07.00, "dinner" at 14.00 and "supper" at 20.00 and a lot of sweets in-between.
We could see big class-distinctions in the village. Some families lived in big beautiful, new-built houses while others lived in small apartments.

Ballet
Just as the neighboring country Russia, Belarus has many talented ballet-dancers. The 19th of

May we went to the theatre house in Minsk to watch the famous play Romeo and Juliet. It was really a special event out of the ordinary. The stage set was amazing.

The Ballet Romeo and Juliet.

The dancers wore up-to-date clothes and you could really see that they had put their hearts and souls into making them. The striking music in the background built up a tension and led the story forward. We had never been to a ballet before so it was a great experience. Compared to a theatre play it was more emotional and you had to think about what message they wanted to give us.

If everything goes as we have planned, the Belarusian students will come to Sweden and visit us this autumn. We are looking forward to meeting them again and we have promised each other to keep in touch.
 We think it’s useful to travel to other countries, because you get a view of the inhabitants culture, history, religion etc. In that way your understanding for other people increase and we think that can prevent many conflicts.

Photos taken by: Staffan Hagström
© 2002 Freeway
Writers: Camilla Bäckman (sp03-29@park.se), Marlene Näslund (sp03-41@park.se) and Sonia Strömberg (sp03-42@park.se).
HTML by: ONy (olle@park.se).