Xerrades sobre la importància de la democràcia
Monday, 25 January 2021 , Andorra
Xerrades sobre la importància de la democràcia
Talks About the Importance of Democracy
During my stay at Faber I participated in five activities total, even though four of them were more or less identical. I gave four talks to the second year ESO students at a school in Ordino, and I visited the Andorra Radio as a guest on the programme about Catalan language.
First, the talks at school. At first I was a bit nervous, as I never spoke about such serious matters to people so young (the students were 12 to 14 years of age, as far as I understood). Thus, I decided to focus on more general topics first, such as democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of media, the purpose of media and the history of media. After main concepts had been established, I moved on to the current situation in Russia, using it as an illustration as to why freedom of speech matters. I intended to make the sessions very interactive, asking the students for their opinions. To my mind, it went very well. I was really surprised to see how much people understood about these concepts at their very tender age! They all seemed to be very engaged and asked me multiple questions. I was especially touched that they asked me just to say something in Russian!
At Radio Andorra I was meant to talk about the Catalan language and my experience learning it (the programme was done in Catalan), however, due to the recent arrest of the opposition politician Alexey Navalny in Russia, we ended up talking about the freedom of speech in Russia as well. I enjoyed my visit to the radio and the opportunity to shed a little bit of light on the extremely dire situation in my birth country.