My reflections on professional work in an intercultural perspective..

As I work in a crisis center for women with violent backgrounds, I meet a lot of people from very different cultures and backgrounds than my own. I see women my own age or even younger who have already been through so much and it makes me think about how different we all are. In my life I have my friends from school and my hobbys etc and I never really have to face the fact that not all people my age are as lucky as me. I mean, while my worries can sometimes seem very important, there are women right here in my city, maybe even my neighbour who have much bigger issues to worry about. But doing this work that I do, has really opened my eyes and got me thinking about a lot of things and it has made me realize that even if I am very pvivileged to not have these worries I am lucky to be in a situation where I have the ressources nessesary to actually help these women and isn't that what our work is really about?

In my practical placement I worked in a very multicultural kindergarten where 90% of all the children were immigrants. This fact both made it a very hard place to work but also very very exciting. Almost every day was different from the other and I got the opportunity to learn so much about their different homecountries and cultures. Meeting the parents was also very exciting and the fact that some of them didn't even speak danish made it very challenging to communicate with them but we always made it work. The staff in the kindergarten, on a regular basis planned dinners and parties for the children and the parents and these events were always very multicultural with food from all the different countries, music from Albania and dance from Turkey etc. Before I started my placement there I, sadly, had a lot of prejudices about a lot of things regarding all the immigrants in Denmark. I have never been a racist but still, I had my preunderstandings. Working there, however totally changed my view on this matter and as I got to know a lot of these families I also realized that many of my preunderstandings were wrong.
Maybe I also even had some prejudices about women staying in violent relationships before I started working at the crisis center but only because I didn't understand.

Speaking of preunderstandings and prejudices, this is something we have worked a lot with on the international course. It is a very common and normal thing for people to have surtain preconceptions but the important thing is that we have an open mind and are willing to let people change our preunderstandings for the better. I think this is what our work with the intercultural meetings is all about. To set aside all of your prejudices and recognise that we are all people and our job as pedagogues, social workers ect is to meet people where they are and have an open mind and also realize that a lot of our prejudices toward other people often have to do with our lack of understanding.

The first couple of weeks

In the international course at Frøbel UCC we are almost 50 people from Spain, Italy, France, Mauritius, Finland, Holland, Greece, Turkey and Denmark. The first couple of weeks have been very exciting!
We have spend a lot of time talking and learning about our different countries and cultures and how pedagogues and socialworkers work very differently in the different countries.
We have talked a lot about prejudices and how people often have pre-understandings of people from other cultures and how to work with that. Also, we have talked a lot about intercultural  meetings and what defines culture such as traditions, economics, class, values, education etc. and not only between countries.
So far it has been really great to meet all these fantastic people and being introduced to the course and I'm very excited to be on this course for the next 5 months!