Development of a training program regarding memory, territory and peace aimed to children and youngsters of the coastal region of the Department of Chocó

This project seeks to promote the cross-generational dialogue of knowledge throughout the use of playful and artistic tools as a means to reconfigure the sociocultural framework and the identity with the community territory from people who were victims of forced displacement and now are coming back to their hometown.

Throughout the design and organization of workshops with school youth and young adults from the southern coastal region of Chocó, artisan fishing (their economic activity) is utilized as a cultural and collective practice, which promotes the articulation between the members of the community and that can as well be consolidated as a bridge for symbolic repairing due to the relationship framework it connotes and the potential of promoting identity and cultural practices anchored in the intergenerational heritage of knowledge.

Within the peace process, the project aims to help (contribute to a long-term goal) generating a present which overcomes the pain suffered, reconstruct solidarity ties, develop recognition and self-recognition of the potential of people who is coming back home, promote and boost their resilience and generate strategies to deal with their past so they can project themselves into the future since their own cosmovision.  These elements are essential for symbolic repairing.  Communities’ cosmovisions enable the victims of crimes against humanity, in conflict contexts, to re-inhabit their everyday life after having lived traumatic events.

Using education as a mechanism of formation of human beings and the most suitable setting to share and transfer knowledge, the project will work so that high-school teachers become memory managers who lead processes in which communities can recognize in daily economic activities – as artisan fishing – a symbolic value for their return and the reconstruction of social and cultural fabric.   Such reconstruction is presented in the sense of repairing and in the intervention with an ethical commitment by enabling a relationship between their own recognition and their territory, and a recognition of “the others” in community.