6/20 - day four

Today was the first day of community placements for students working at two organizations: Kotti and Neopanterra! Everyone else had a free morning and afternoon to explore Berlin. The Neopanterra students met with Manuela at 9 AM to make the hour-and-a-half journey to Potsdam (apparently they got lost).

I was in the Kotti group, and Kathryn took us to Kotti’s administrative office in Kreuzberg. We met with Julie and Monique, one of the organization’s administrative officials who was a very nice woman. Monique gave us an overview of the Kreuzberg neighborhood and the parts of Kreuzberg that Kotti served. Then she walked us around the neighborhood, and informed us of the gentrification that has occurred. We ended up at a bustling community center, where Katie was placed. Over sparkling water we learned about the history of the center from a woman who had been working there for twenty-seven years! Then we toured the elementary school, which was so different than traditional American schools. There were pictures of students all over the classroom, and school seemed fun!

We left Katie and walked to another elementary school, where I was placed. From the outside, the school  buildings were covered in lots of graffiti and seemed somewhat rundown. Yet when we toured several classrooms, we were surprised to find fun, well-built Montessori-style classrooms. One room had hammocks, and another had two levels! A third-grade class was doing a theatrical rendition of the Gruffalo, an example of the fun activities that German schoolchildren get to do. I was placed to work at an after-school program for fourth to sixth graders, but I could only stay for lunch that day. I was not expecting for their school lunches to be so vegetable-rich and delicious-looking.

Later in the afternoon, all of the UW students congregated in Die Fabrike to head back to the Humboldt University area to visit Maxim Gorki for an acting workshop. We are seeing a play called Crazy Blood tomorrow, and to prepare we met with one of the directors to explore stereotypes and societal hierarchies. We did acting exercises miming “macho, loser, leader, and emancipated female” characters. We also had to make short scenes depicting some character (of our choice) bringing a gun into a classroom. As Americans, all of us were taken aback by what this exercise was asking of us, given the history of school shootings in our country. Two of the groups chose to go a funny route in tackling the prompt, while my group went dark (a boy who had gotten rejected thrice when asking girls to prom). After the exercise, we had a very interesting discussion with the director about why this exercise was so uncomfortable for us to perform. The entire workshop functioned as an interesting cultural comparison between Germany and the United States, because the workshops were usually done with German schoolchildren. I am very excited to see Crazy Blood tomorrow!

Very hungry, everyone headed to a delicious Italian restaurant together for some delicious pasta and good conversation. We ate our fill (plus some). After a few hours of chatting, we bid adieu to Julie and Kathryn, heading back to Die Fabrik on the S-bahn.