Steps to Success: Goals, Commitment, Pride

The destruction of the walls that lock us in is not an easy feat. Many people build these walls up to protect themselves and their families from something unfamiliar to them. Our mission this year is to slowly chip away at some of these walls that society has built up and help let people with cultural and racial differences in. This project is very close to home for us as some of our team members and coordinators are immigrants themselves. For this reason we know the struggles and the hardships that one might face when coming into a new society first hand. Our project is focusing in on children, teenagers and adults who have immigrated to Cyprus, and more specifically our community and who might find themselves prejudice against for the reason. However, these walls that we, as a society have built up against people who are from different cultural backgrounds isn’t the only problem. We are also focusing on building up migrants and helping them adjust to a new culture. This week our first goal is to design posters, create a blog and draw a logo all to help advertise our cause to our school and community. 

We have developed many skills so far including teamwork, adaptability, organization and communication. We had to communicate to be able to design cohesive posters as well as compromise in creating a powerful logo that we all like. We consistently had to work as a team and be organized to set up dates to meet outside of school and get work done. We have all learned that we are a much more creative team than we had previously thought because we were able to create beautiful and powerful designs to advertise our cause. We believe our biggest challenge to be getting people to question their past prejudices and be open to hearing an opinion that is not their own. We hope that by meeting new people, holding bazaars and giving speeches we can change peoples perceptions about the people around them. However, every challenge we face and every activity we take part in shapes us not only as students but also as active members of a more diverse society. 

As a team we would strongly encourage our peers to engage in similar projects and help the wider community develop stronger bonds with immigrants while aiming at their easier integration. Whether it might be sitting down with a new classmate or helping your new neighbor with taking out their trash there are many ways in which we can welcome people into our society. We have great confidence in our generation that after becoming aware of the issue through education and the drive to learn and empathize, which we intend to enforce through our project, they will leave their prejudices behind. They will in turn join us on our journey to help the Cypriot society to see immigrants not as foreigners, but as people.

We have learned to appreciate each other’s intelligence, however only by uniting our strengths were we able to produce what we haves so far.