From previous week on, Fridays don’t coincide only with the day of the thought of freedom and fun, but also with the weekly update about the activities of Universo. So, not to keep you in suspense anymore, it is our pleasure to present what we have done throughout this week!

First of all, there was a change in the Italian classes, so before coming the next week I would recommend to check the time schedule. The new classes offer more opportunities for the people to learn the material they want according to their level and more varieties with the hours. The rest of the classes, like German, French and Spanish, will remain at the same hours without further changes. It brought us a lot of happiness to see the growing enthusiasm and the increase in the number of students attending the classes and we would like to see more and more people to join our big family of Universo. Last but not least, we also offer Informatic classes, which after surviving the electricity problems continue their successful path. However, I know that Friday is not the best day for classes as our thoughts are focused on the plans for the weekend, but it would be nice to see more fresh faces in the classes on Friday.

I think the highlights of this week were Universo in Gita and the Transcultural Workshop. In the weekly Universo in Gita on Wednesday morning we had a tour around the Piazza Maggiore. Through interactive teaching we learned a lot about his place. We had to complete some tasks like read the poem written out of the Christmas lights on Via d’Azeglio and find out who is the singer (spoiler alert: his name was Lucio Dalla) and shortly describe what the poem is about, take a group picture with the statue of Neptune, count the stairs of Basilica San Petronio. We had a lot of fun and it was nice to experience the Christmas spirit not only with your colleagues but also the migrants. In Transcultural Workshop on Thursday we played the game of Dixit, where we had lot of laughs throughout the game. We learned a lot about each other and interacted through something that all cultures love, laughing and fun.

It was another amazing week in Universo, full of laughs and good time, but also, many activities and interactions that develop the sense of unity between us, the family of Universo. Have a nice weekend!!

Every week an intern from Universo will write a so-called “weekly blog” in which we’ll update you on everything that’s going on in and around all of our offices – so welcome to the weekly blog number 1! This week the whole Universo team was working on our usual weekly activities and we are happy to present to you everything that happened!

The same as every week, we organised the language classes every day from Monday to Friday. Here at Universo we offer free Italian, English, German, French and Spanish lessons which are open to public. We are very happy that our students actively participate in the classes and keep coming to all our offices – Piazza XX Settembre, Pilastro and Cencetti – every week to learn a new language. We also had our weekly informatics class, which didn’t go as smoothly as we’d want…. as we lost the electricity a couple of times! 😀 But we fixed the problem quickly and our students were able to learn something despite the small technical difficulties.

On Wednesday we all participated in Universo in Gita. Every week we get to go out of the office to discover different places in Bologna – places that are useful for people who are new to the city. This time we visited Museo Davia Bargellini, where we enjoyed a beautiful collection of paintings along with a selection of objects from the applied arts of various provenance. The collection previously belonged to Davia family, a distinguished Bolognese family residing in the palace until 1874, and is still situated in the palace by the same name, which creates an authentic eighteenth-century Bolognese setting.

On Thursdays we normally have Transcultural Workshop and this week was no different. First we played a game that was designed to help us understand how we learn different codes of conduct while moving to another country/cultural environment. The idea of the game is that the players sit around in a circle and have to pass the scissors from one player to another. The objective of the game is for each player to work out the rule of the game through playing it. You can find the more detailed instruction for the game here. After that we played another game called Leila’s Problem that is designed in a way to make the players think about which kind of behaviour they do or do not approve of based on very little information that they get about every character in the story. The game involved listening to an interesting love story… with some scary elements! We survived it safely, however 😀 If you’d like to play the game you can find it under this post. 🙂

We had lot of fun this week and learnt a lot about each other, our countries and cultures. We hope you enjoyed reading about our week and don’t forget to come back for the next weekly blog next month!

Leila’s Problem

-> First part of the game : Read the story and once you have finished, mark the most positive character with five (5) and the least positive one with one (1). DO NOT read the second part until you’ve finished this part of the game:

Leila is in love with Mohammed. She wants to cross the river full of crocodiles to meet her love. She goes to Ahmed, who has a boat, and asks him to take her to the other side of the river. Ahmed says no to Leila. After this, Leila goes to Ali, who also has a boat, and asks him to take her across the river. Ali replies that if Leila spends the night with him, he will take her over the river the next day. Leila accepts the deal. The next day Leila finally meets Mohamed and tells him everything that happened. Mohammed rejects her. Leila leaves and she is very sad. As she is walking on the street, she runs into Jaffar and tells him everything that has happened to her. Later that day, Jaffar meets Mohamed and beats him up.

-> Second part of the game : Now, you can read the details of the story that you didn’t know when you did your list and try to figure out how it changes your perception of it and its characters, what you assumed but wasn’t necessarily the case:

Leila is a 16-year-old student and she is in love with her teacher, Mohamed. Mohamed has 2 children. Ahmed is Mohamed’s colleague who doesn’t want to be involved in a teen’s love “affair” and he thinks it’s a bad idea for Leila to visit Mohamed and to cross the river. Ali is Leila’s grandfather, who asks Leila to spend the night with him, hoping that she is giving up on visiting Mohamed in the morning. When Leila sleeps there, they play cards and drink tea. Jaffar is a psychopath who beats up or kills everyone who causes him pain. He has a crush on Leila.

 

After weeks of preparation and organization Universo’s international evening finally happened last Friday.

From the feedback and smiles on the pictures (see above and below) we can say that it was a success!

The biggest part of the work started on Friday morning, all the interns were responsible for cooking and serving on the day, not to mention the main organizers who were also responsible for the decoration and preparing the place. All of us were motivated to make this evening enjoyable.

The programme started at around 18:30 with an intercultural game organized by our interns Indah and Lara: “Foro dello scambio”. The goal was to learn about the different cultures around us. We learned about historical monuments in many parts of the world. Did you know that in Indonesia there is an almost 140 meters high tower with a gold statue at the top, as a commemorative point for Independence of Indonesia? Or that in the Parliament of Budapest we can see the mummified arm of the first Hungarian King? Fascinating!

We continued with a transcultural workshop: quick questions following the model of “Never have I ever”, do you know this game? We learned a lot about our guests, many of them traveled in more than ten counties and some of them even experienced temperatures below -15 degrees Celsius! Can you believe it?

Then came the time for the recovered stories: Lubna is a Moroccan girl and came to meet us to participate in an interview about the rights of women in her country and the differences encountered here in Italy. This discussion was so interesting, she explained to us that… oh  wait, no spoilers!

If you are curious about the story of Lubna and were not present at the event, you will be able to find the filmed interview on our blog very soon, it is in French and Italian!

We finally opened the door to the “snacks room” and finished the evening listening to live music: thanks to Lucas, Simon, Gabriel and Marc for creating the really cool ambiance with acoustic music and to DJ Kapi for his more reggaeton-ish universe.

Thanks to Aurora, Dawid, Ramona and Pau for the organisation and to the all interns for support! We hope you had a good evening with us and to see you for the next event 🙂

The aim of the redecoration of the Piazza XX Settembre office was to make Universo a bit more cheerful and homey. Our idea was to create a welcoming space where everyone can cozy up during the day but which also inspires them to study and socialise.

 

To achieve this goal we have created a spot for relaxation; we made a couch out of an old desk and sewed cushions. To make the office more colorful, we painted the logo of the association on the wall and created a mosaic from old CDs. We made welcome signs in various languages and we covered a wall with pictures of Italy in the office where we welcome Universo users. The biggest challenge was that our budget was very low and we could not realise some of our plans but this eventually led us to come up with more and more creative ideas such as ways of repurposing old furniture.

 

All the interns and volunteers took part in the redecoration: we painted the walls, reorganized the rooms, made furniture and created decorations together. Needless to say, this was a nice way of team-building.

After six days of work, we finished most of the redecoration and started using the new office. Although we could not realise all of our ideas, it might be inspiring for others to see how we created a new space together as a community. Moreover, the low budget led us to repurpose old furniture, which is an eco-friendly way of doing up an office.