Every month, from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., we organize a party for the young people, with food from their culture that they bring with them, traditional or modern music and dance that they enjoy and like to share, people talking about their experiences before arriving in Switzerland or since arriving in the region (and testimonials from local Swiss people too), discussion about their dreams, their projects, the flame of what makes them tick inside, various games and sports time, and the evening ends with a disco to festive tunes from their respective countries so that everyone can dance together. It’s an alcohol-free evening, with the joy of being together and supporting each other in our dreams. These moments are also a positive outlet for the tensions and frustrations the young people build up over the month, as sport, dance, verbalization and a sense of belonging are all ingredients that build resilience and induce hope.
Live Your Dreams is a laboratory for human cohesion across cultural, ethnic, linguistic, religious and economic barriers. Exploring the meeting of migrants, who often have little power of expression and few privileges (they have to rebuild their lives from scratch), with other young people who have a more established life and enjoy more privileges, means finding ourselves as one human family for a given period of time.
Giving a voice to those who have the least, who arrive at the very bottom of the social ladder, and enabling them to find their way through support and celebration around their dreams, can only generate constructive effects, at least psychologically, and sometimes also, hopefully, materially. Giving back the power of commitment to young people who feel powerless in the face of difficulties could inspire other young people in the same situation, whether or not they come from a migrant background. Solidarity between migrants who are already established and those who have just arrived will be increasingly realized, as will solidarity and reconciliation between young people from backgrounds that are in ideological confrontation.
The aim of the project is not to find solutions to potential problems, but to offer them and the “local” young people a platform for youth cohesion, unity in diversity, and possible mutual help in realizing the dreams and wishes that these young people pursue in their lives. Many arrive in Switzerland with their childhood dreams shattered, with no hope of reviving them. Many arrive with broken family relationships and friendships, sometimes in extreme solitude. Many of our “local” young people experience broken dreams or similar loneliness, though often more psychologically than materially. Whether the dreams are psychologically or materially broken, whether the loneliness is psychological or material in origin, the meeting point remains the same, and the emotional experience similar. Live Your Dreams is a meeting point of human to human through what connects us: our dreams, our hopes and our pains, and our desire to belong and connect.
By demonstrating that through celebration, verbalizing our difficulties, through sport, dance, art, music, food and the sharing of inspiring testimonials, we can create, in the space and time of an evening, an atmosphere of human family unity, and by demonstrating this through the prism of youth, those young people who are the future of society, we can hope for the effect of nurturing more humane future days for these young people, for our region and for the world in which they will evolve.
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Here, diversity is a source of richness, faith an open path and a shared mission.
The Village Mosaïque welcomes you, whatever your background or beliefs.
IBAN:
CH30 0900 0000 1000 2814 0
EEM Lausanne
Badenerstrasse 69
8004 Zürich
