In a Servas newsletter earlier this year I saw the mention of Georgia's first Peace Camp. My partner Rick and I had an independent trip to Georgia already booked. What a surprise to find that the camp was in a tiny rural village, Lamovani, about an hour's travel from Tbilisi and one day of the camp coincided with our time there.
The camp was organised by an energetic and inspiring young English teacher, Nino, in the local school. She'd been inspired to arrange the camp by Mehmet Ates from Turkey. Mehmet has been running peace camps in Turkey since 2009 and hasn’t missed a year despite Covid and the recent severe earthquake. He now has the concept of a "permanent " camp, with all infrastructure ready for whenever he has volunteers to help run it
Mehmet and 7 other volunteers came from Turkey for the week. Other volunteers included young people working and studying in Tbilisi as well as other internationals who'd flown in specially. Countries represented were Colombia, Netherlands, South Korea, India, USA, Hong Kong, Jordan aand us from Australia. There was also quite a collection of ex-students from the school.
It was impressive to see how many students and teachers were in attendance!
Being a small school, there were actually more volunteers than students! Since the camp was being run in the school holidays it was impressive to see how many students and teachers were in attendance.
We were there on the opening day, helping a little, but gaining so much from the experience. Activities included excellent interactive games, singing, dancing, health checks, icecream making and plenty of time to chat with the children, some parents, teachers and the other volunteers. It was truly a privilege to attend and a pity we had to leave.
It was a huge undertaking for Nino and following the reports on the WhatsApp group chat for the rest of the week we know is was a massive success.
Some of the volunteers were planning to continue on to the camp in Uganda.
By: Wendy Batey, Servas Australia