Hi everybody, ciao a tutti! My name is Fatima, I’m 22 years old and I come from Italy yet born in Morocco to a Moroccan family.
I am so happy to be back home with you all. It is beautiful because I came back to my place, to my community, to my residence, to my Mensa ladies, to some of my teachers, to my mood, to my memories. I came to where I left it, and this makes me happy. It’s beautiful to see all of you here glowing with your colours and spreading some love that is very needed at the moment. And I want to thank you for giving me the chance to see this once again.
Today is a pretty special day isn’t it? So many flags around, so many people celebrating the beauty of diversity and perhaps someone feeling a little homesick with their national dress on. You see, all of you in here, standing and celebrating together exactly those diversities that someone thinks should divide you, is not as simple and immediate as it may appear.
You guys are the living representation of what this place means, and you are doing it so good.
Back to the beauty of you, of us today, I think it is worth spending sometime on trying to reflect over what is our role in here.
What I believe we are having here is a life lesson. We all, at a very young age, have packed our stuff, gathered all of our energy and braveness, perhaps shut down part of our fear (as I did), and moved out of our home. We moved to a place we have never been to before, and started a new life with new people. You are now living with friends from completely different countries, with different habits, thoughts, values which may clash with yours at times.
But you are doing it so good.
It’s true, today we are celebrating peace but the peace we are embracing is the one we are building, and it really starts with you, and with us all, here.
I still remember my first days at the college. It was beautiful to have someone picking me up from the bus station, I remember Hermione running to me with a warm chocolate brioche, hugging me and telling “Welcome to Duino, Fatima, this your breakfast”. And then when I arrived after a 20 minutes ride to the College, I remember I was so lost with all of those people with big smiles screaming hey, ciao all over piazza. And then I also remember when my buddy came to me and wanted me so bad to go with him for an ice cream, and asked me about myself, my life, my dreams and he told me about his.
I must admit, at the end of the week there was only one question smashing my head: what is going on with these people?
You know I could not see the reality, at the beginning, of all of this. Actually, I could not see it even before coming – I mean, the College looked too unrealistic and utopian to me, and the stories coming from the students as well. Yes, I could imagine this place with many different people, but I also predicted so many issues and miscomprehension or, at least, very little space for dialogue.
But I was clearly wrong.
The story of Mohamed reminds me of that of Areen (Palestine) and Mor (Israel). The devotion and energy that they dedicated to every focus, project, conference, lunch meal and evening tea, was immense. Mor and Areen have taught me that, symbolically speaking, although everyone around says that those two colours could never match, for whatever reason, if you think they might then go ahead. Just as they did, and as Emmanuel (South Sudan), Dlher (Iraq), Hala (Syria), Siham (Palestine), Laura (Italy), and many others did.
But it also reminds me of those warm moments in which we were, unconsciously, building our community. Of those Open Mics where poems were read and thoughts were shared and somehow it always ended in either having all Spanish speakers singing outloud Caraluna (Bacilos) and us with them, or all of us standing in a big huggy-circle while singing Bella Ciao.
Those places, those people and those moments remarkably signed my life.
I learned there were things more important than those I thought were so, and that there are people around me with stories and that knowing those stories was an opportunity I was given.
I learned I had a responsibility once out, and that was not to loose nor to forget all that I had seen and lived here.
I can tell you though that because of this, one of the hardest things once out there is to justify and make sense of all that goes on outside of here.
When I first came to the college, in 2017 I thought I was so sure of who I was and who I wanted to be. My values and priorities were crystal-clear to me, and they still are. However, something at some point changed. I thought I knew who I was because I was talked about so much. I knew I was a Moroccan girl living in Italy, therefore I knew I was not an Italian citizen, I knew I was a Muslim, I knew I was an “extra” to an already built and solid society to which I eventually owed a favour for having hosted and educated me.
I knew I was one of those people over which thousands of discussions and debates and arguments and fights go on every single day. I knew I was the object of all of that. It was just like identifying myself in a picture that was not drawn by me neither by someone close to me.
It was the idea of me which somehow, between lines, was telling me that I couldn’t go beyond certain limits because otherwise that would get out of my person. So I was someone for whom specific things were thought, and that was it.
Perhaps I never seriously thought of it, but day after day, while being here and sharing days and months with these people, I started deeply wondering.
This place has offered me the opportunity to be heard and understood, the possibility to risk it with my ideas, and the space to dream and to plan them.
It offered me the privilege of having adults listening to me without a compliant attitude but rather with an active one through which you could understand that they were interested to what you were saying. It gave me that sense of responsibility and possibility that is hard to find out there. And as long as you are here, I would like you to take advantage of that.
I realised that who I wanted to be was not part of that picture.It was totally outside of it, and found no way to justify that sense of inappropriateness. So I started wondering whether I was already supposed to fail for whatever reason or whether it was worth trying to draw my own picture, and I drew it, I drew it here at the college.
I realised, throughout my two years here, that very often we underestimate and perhaps forget our right and responsibility to be subjects, not objects, of our own stories. And here I, as many of my friends, became the subject of mine.
UWC is a huge movement, but the people inside it are the real change. Listen to every single story coming from the experience of your friends, ask them, take all advices from the teachers, take advantage of all the opportunities that are offered to you, learn things you always thought you wouldn’t like, ask questions you are afraid of.
This place has given me, and will give, you space. It will give you a lot of options, possibilities and opportunities, just as it had with me. And it is up to you to choose what to do with that. This place puts together so many of us. It reunites people with different lives and lifestyles, with different thoughts and believes, different convictions, different cornerstones. It puts together different life experiences, different testimonies, different stories.
It puts all of this together, and it lets it be.
And this is the result.
The result is that it can work out. It can be and it can be something beautiful and powerful. UWC has taught me that it is not easy, it is not always fine, it can be quite bad, often. It has taught me that out there it’ll be hard and very frustrating at times, that you might feel misunderstood and strongly judged, and perhaps your ideas might be laughed upon.
None of this is wrong. But it taught me that it can be possible.
And I chose to try it.
