Six teens & two staff take part in third annual Minneapolis-Berlin exchange program!

Six teens and two staff participated in the Minneapolis-Berlin Exchange Program from March 30 – April 6 as part of a project with a sister neighborhood center in the Marzahn neighborhood of East Berlin. For the past three years our teens have traveled there in the spring, and in return a group of German teens and youth workers stay at our Brian Coyle Center during the fall. The teens from Pillsbury United Communities met every week for two months prior to their trip to learn about the history and culture of Germany, pick up some basic German vocabulary, and develop conflict-resolution and team building skills. Sarah Klouda, youth manager at our Oak Park Center, says the trip was “a once in a lifetime opportunity for us all, and for most of the students we brought it was their first time out of the state – or even in an airport for that matter!”After over 20 hours of traveling the group arrived in Berlin. The center was beautiful and the Germans were incredibly welcoming. The kids made friends with each other almost instantly, wasting no time! The first day there was spent traveling around the city by train and foot. The group went to a museum where there was the largest constructed dinosaur skeleton in the world; they went up the TV Tower (a tower over 600 feet high) and got a view of the entire city; they walked through the city on an educational scavenger hunt where they had to identify key landmarks in the city. The teens and youth workers eventually made it on foot to the Memorial for Murdered Jews of Europe where they learned about how the Holocaust affected Jewish families differently.

The group also spent a lot of time visiting and learning about their different community centers. One day they walked to a nearby center and helped with a huge kick-off event the whole day. There were at least 100 kids there and they thought the Americans were celebrities – they were even asking the teens for autographs!

The next day the group walked around the German association where there is little except high rise housing, where over a hundred thousand people reside. Instead of community centers, they had little log cabins around for the kids to go to for activities where they would help with school work, teach arts and crafts and even woodworking.

The American students’ favorite day was a visit to a high school in Berlin. One of the German students got permission from her school to bring them there, sit in on two classes and tour the building. The entire student body knew the group was coming, so the Minneapolis kids got a lot of attention! One teacher dedicated her whole class to question and answer time just for the visit. Overall, the trip was a huge success, the students learned priceless things about culture, people and most importantly themselves.