Hi dear saharawi journal,
Today was Wednesday and it was our last day at the youth forum for peace. Today, we had an unplanned half day given that the service project that was scheduled was cancelled, which is why we had the testimony narrations in the morning. Our leaders, Dan Cotton and Danny Thompson, both shared their stories to everybody present. Their stories were very powerful and well received by everyone in the audience. After their testimonies, we split up to go eat lunch with our "host families" for the forum. During this time, my small group had an amazing time talking and at some point, one of the girls in my group got in a very deep conversation about faith with one of the young muslim girls that were hosting us. This conversation then turned into a time of sharing, and the hostess started sharing about her story and struggles to one of the girls in our group. She continued to open up as the girl in our group kept encouraging her and saying kind words to her. This was an amazing thing to experience since it is not often that you see two people from different beliefs and religions opening up to each other and being encouraging to one another. It was very encouraging. After this we met with the rest of our group and headed back to Smara. Once we got to Smara we did some reflections with the Not Forgotten team about the whole forum, providing our insights and feeback. After this, we got back to Raiis' house and did more debriefing with our own team. We then went on to eat dinner with Raiis and his family and shared some jokes and riddles that had to be translated back and forth several times. For the remaining of the night we played several games that included card tricks, magic tricks (including a trick performed by me and Richard that took like an hour for everyone to get) and even practicing some tea preparation. I personally took a nice shower and felt really clean a fulfilled. It was a great day.
-Dav A.
