Hello from Timor-Leste

Welcome to the Peace Project’s blog! Here, we will come with a steady flow of posts during our next two weeks in Timor-Leste.

The Peace Project’s role is to follow up on former winners of the Students Peace Prize, and help them with current projects. Earlier Peace Project teams has been to Zimbabwe and Croatia, and this year we landed on Timor-Leste. Our team consists of 5 students from Trondheim, and throughout almost 2 weeks, we will work together with the very first winner of the Student Peace Prize, Antero da Silva.

The Peace Project started to work on the follow-up project in Timor-Leste already in the spring of 2016. Since then there have been multiple meetings, workshops, seminars, study sessions and late nights. During all this work we decided to renovate the Peace Centre at the University in Dili, as well as hold a seminar over 5 days, with the theme “The importance of young people’s civic engagement”. We have invited both young farmers and students to to take part in the seminar, as the majority of the population is youths and both are essential to good discussions and debates. The seminar will be held January 8-12th, with different themes every day, including diversity, sustainable development, peaceful activism and future.

We arrived in Timor-Leste today, January 2nd, and are currently working on the final details for the seminar. We are all very excited to meet the young farmers and students, and are looking forward to work with them.