Recently in Suggested Theme Category

"Death" should be added to the list of themes.

About two years ago a huge exhibition was hosted in Hamburg's biggest art museum, Die Kunsthalle, displaying paintings by Caspar David Friedrich. CDF, like many other Romantic painters has a fascination with death. They loved to paint things such as graveyards, skulls and tombstones.



Working in a hospital makes "death" a common issue in my daily work life, especially in the intensive care unit: How far should we go? How bad a life is worth living? How would the patient have liked to die? On the other hand, I find it shocking how little it is present in our normal life. We all know, our time is limited. We all know that the average life expectancy in the developed world is around 80 years, yet we are surprised, shocked, disturbed when somebody does happen to buy the farm at that age.

In a world dominated by youthfulness, there's a need to look at the other end of the life cycle.

The theme combines personal, political, ideological, religious and philosophic questions. And can be stretched into directions such as:
- Capital punishment - right or wrong?
- Euthanasia - right or wrong?
- How would you like to die? Young, old, fast, slow?
- Suicide - is it a last resort, an act of aggression or simply a lethal psychiatric disorder?

Suggested Theme.

These days, Barack Obama is gathering world leaders in Washington to discuss the future of nuclear security. A good time to consider the topic for CISV! So many things are connected to the topics we deal with:

• Does the existence of nuclear weapons support or disrupt world peace?
• Is nuclear energy a solution to global warming?
• How to solve the issue with Iran's nuclear ambitions?

They're all highly political questions, but CISV could provide the setting to get a clearer picture and discuss different opinions. I remember an activity on this topic during my Seminar Camp, that was quite intense.

I suggest taking the chance that the newspapers are full of great articles these days in order to set up a theme package.

Oh...and wouldn't the title "Nuclear Minicamp" sound sexy?

A new category at FTB suggesting themes for CISV activities.

In CISV, sometimes I've often felt frustrated with the depth of discussions on popular themes, such as genetic engineering or nuclear energy. I felt that with the lack of knowledge activities dealing with these topics rarely provided me with much usefulness, and I wonder whether CISV is the right setting to learn about these things. I've had way better experiences withe themes dealing with personal views, morals, ethics, cultural issues. Areas with little scientific background, large cultural and interpersonal differences, and absolutely no clear right or wrong.

Nevertheless, I still believe that within CISV we should be able to deal with more "political" topics, if you preserve a "personal connection" and provide with background literature. So with this post I'm making a first attempt to suggest themes for CISV activities, that fits these criterias pretty well. What you will find below are objectives, a brainstorm of ideas to develop activities, and a few links to more information.



Organic Food

I've chosen "Organic Food", because I think it's an ideal theme for CISV, yet rarely discussed, and one of my personal favourites*. With a bit of adaption, this activity could also work for village kids, but I guess it's mainly for 14+.

Possible objectives:

- To generate a better understanding of the different variants of "Organic Food".
- To exchange personal views on what choices are made concerning food consumption.
- To discuss the concept of "voting with a trolly", and how much impact it can have.



Possible activities:

- Collect pictures or original items from a local supermarket and have participants list things into following categories: "I usualy buy...", "I rarely buy...", "I would never buy". Alternative: Visit a local supermarket in pairs and have them explain each other food they buy, or won't ever buy (make a blacklist!).
- Ask people to sort their priorities when chosing food by "flavour", "health", "price", "moral", "ecological impact".
- Have participants brainstorm, what they consider "organic"-food.
- Split into smaller groups, provide with material and have them present in a creative way the following concepts: Fair trade, "Buy Local", Genetic engineered food, Veganism.
- Brainstorm why these concepts may have their downsides.
- Have an open discussion round on whether "voting with a trolly" works
- Ask participants to look at their shopping list again, and ask whether they would through out certain items, or even add others.



Material

• Organic Food at Wikipedia: This article was marked to be checked for "neutrality" - which gives an impression, how political this topic is.
  
• Local purchasing, explained at Wikipedia
• What is local - a website explaining the difference between local and sustainable
• The Buy local myth - an excerpt from the NYT
• Voting with a trolly - The Economist devoted a whole section to the topic of "food politics in Dec 2006, unfortunately you can only read the first paragraphs without paying - but it still gives a good impression.
• Veganism - a long and good introduction by Wikipedia, unfortunately a bit uncritical.
• Another lengthy article on Veganism, includuding criticism regarding health and ethics.

The material list is far from complete, and I apologize for all those Wikipedia links - if you can provide more and better stuff, please post them in the comments section.

*I like the topic, not because I think everybody should buy "organic", but because it's fascinating how easily people are tricked into thinking they are buying something "good". In my eyes there's some "Aufklärungsbedarf" - need for education!

A few weeks ago quite an interesting discussion took place over at the JB community list on the recent war in Gaza. Obviously a hard question to answer, whether this war was right or wrong, or how else the conflict could be solved, but I appreciated the amount of information that was added by all the participants of the discussion - especially all the newspaper sources that were aggregated.

I would like to see somebody create a "theme package" on the Middle East Conflict to be used in CISV camps, just like the WiFight package for youth meetings. Here's what I think the theme package should include:

- a range of newspaper articles featuring the history of the conflict
- a list of activities for various age groups
- questions for possible debriefings and discussions

The discussion thread could be the basis for all this, and the theme package could be assembled in JBPedia. It's all out there, just somebody needs to put it together. The Middle East Conflict is already something participants talk about in almost every camp - let's give it some more substance.