Operation Day’s Work is an opportunity for Norwegian youth to attend work instead of school for one day, but the income of this day is donated to the ODW project of the year. This year the project was to clean up oil-spills in the Niger Delta, but also to inform Nigerian youth about their rights, teach them about environmentally friendly alternatives to oil, help them get an income by installing and selling renewable energy, and to fight against oil-spills and pollution in a friendly and nonviolent way.
In preparation we made a poster for the “Naturforbundet”-room, in this room they talked specifically about the Niger Delta problem seeing that Naturforbundet was the “leader” of this years ODW project. We also hung up Naturforbundet’s own poster, the one saying “vi er alle olje barn” with a lot of general information on it. I also gathered information about Naturforbundet, both via their website but also by attending the lecture about the oil-spills. I also volunteered to present the play called “Play Alter Native” at the Black Box. This play is about some rich “idiots” that polluted a river so that the less fortunate would drink it and go mad, but because everyone went mad they were still happy, and since they all were mad they thought they were normal and that the “idiots” were mad. The “idiots” then decided to charge the less fortunate for drinking the water. And this is where the conflict starts. This play shows war and what happens when money and power takes part in the picture. To prepare for this room I read an excerpt of the play, which you can find here. I chose to solve the “task” this way because gathering information about the subject before actually going and telling other students about it just made sense to me. I didn’t want to be standing there and not be able to answer the questions I might have gotten.
On the day itself we “hung out” outside of our assigned rooms and welcoming people to join the lectures. If anyone looked a bit unsure about entering the room we would tell them a little bit about what was going on inside so that they could decide for themselves if they were interested enough to stick around. But we made sure to tell them that it was really interesting and that they would regret it if they walked away, just to trick them into staying. We pretty much did the same for the “Naturforbundet” room and the Black Box room.
The process was pretty much seamless, I didn’t experience any sort of miscalculation that would make the day not go like it should. However I did notice that there was a lot more “traffic” in one of the hallways, this could have been sorted out by opening doors and letting the students know that there were even more rooms to visit in the other hallway. This should have been done better because the rooms on the more quiet side of the school didn’t get as many visitor, although they had just as important information to give the students.
All over the international day was a success, I enjoyed it a lot. It was a fun twist on an otherwise normal school day. And by giving each student the opportunity to chose which lecture they wanted to listen to, I think that many of them paid more attention, exactly because they could chose for themselves to attend a lecture they were interested in.
Ingrid Kleiven 