Gay CISV.

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Vendel_Bluegrass.jpgIt's been a while since I've read De dagen van de bluegrassliefde (English: The days of bluegrasslove or in German: Spring wenn Du dich traust) by Edward van de Vendel (check his website). Although the word CISV never appears in his book, it tells the story of a boy who discovers his homosexuality in what obviously seems to be a CISV Village.

Interesting, since homosexuality is an issue that appears in almost every camp (probably because of the quite contrary cultural acceptance), but never made into the Education Circle. (Or just maybe implicit in the "etc" in the prejudices section..?)


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I am just wondering why you are assuming that the camp he is talking about is a CISV Village? Couldn't it be a normal summer camp of another organisation/summer camp company or something that also preaches friendship and etc? I read a little bit about it and from what I got out, it could hardly be a CISV camp. Also, check this out (which makes it even less likely to be CISV).

http://www.nlpvf.nl/book/book2.php?Book=328

But since you have read the book, I'm just intrigued to know what made you think it was a CISV village (could you give examples from the book?)

On another level, homosexuality is a topic has been a very delicate issue in all the camps and is one of those CISV "hot" topics that stir emotions whenever discussed. I do not see this as something that should go in the education circle explicitly because it is implicated in many ways (Inter-relation of people, Cultural sensitivity, Prejudice, Social Justice etc...) We can't tackle every prejudices in the world in our education circle yet I do not agree to have

*ethnocentrism
*xenophobia
*religious intolerance
*racism

just so that we say that we name a few prejudices in our education circle. Prejudices should be taken as a whole and not specified since it could range widely and have equal importance.


Here are two quotes that I tried to translate from my German edition:

"The Little World Organisation has its roots in the dreams of an old lady..."

"Every summer between forty and fifty LWO-camps took place. Every camp consisted of 10 international delegations, each with two girls and two boys, all 10-years old, accompanied by a leader. In a addition there was a staff - three people from the host country, who organize the camp - and 4 18 year old junior assistants."

"In a huge circle around the flag pole, the right arm over the left, holding the next ones hand..."

Any more doubts?

I do agree that CISV should educate against any kind of prejudices - but the weak side of the Education circle is that it is very, very abstract. Personally, I think CISV should be way more explicit about its educational content - and "homophobia" as a theme should be part of it.

Ok those quotes are very very persuasive, and I agree this is CISV he's talking about...

Does it say where was the camp and when (which year) and in what month?

I get what you mean by the educational circle being too abstract. It's very easy to say that CISV educates its members against prejudices, global awareness etc... But I don't see this as something wrong. Something like the educational circle has to be a bit abstract to give a global view of the organization's educational principles.

Yet I do agree that we need to be more explicit about our educational content and the themes we talk about. That could be done as an appendix to the educational circle, something new that goes with the circle and explicitly shows what are the themes that each of those abstract component in the circle could aboard. That's what I think :)

This seems like a hardly-ever-ending discussion. I think that the problem is not that we are not working enough against prejudism- I think the problem comes from somewhere else.

As the educational circle, and here I agree with Nick, is quite abstract, the issues we deal with are really abstract too. Sometimes, they are so abstract (and PEACE itself is a really abstract word) that we have a hard time transfering them into our not-abstract daily lifes. And this is what we rarely deal with in CISV programmes.

Is homosexuality a GENDER or a SEX discussion? Maybe a mixture of both, but still, instead of making the for youth really "interesting" issues: Sex, Drugs, Money, etc... part of our programme, we abandon it TOTALLY (Im not saying that drugs should be allowed at villages here), meaning that we dont do and consume it on programmes for risk management reasons, but it addition- ahm- lets not talk about it.

I think that discovering ones sexuality is a huge part of everyones youth, for both- homo- and heterosexuals and as long as CISV as an educational organisation doesnt realise that it is important to deal with these kind of things in some way, too, were far from treating homosexuality in a proper way.

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This page contains a single entry by Nick published on February 17, 2009 7:18 AM.

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