Matthew Xuereb joined young people from across the Mediterranean and beyond for ten days at La Vela in Castiglione della Pescaia, sharing rooms, meals, conversations and moments of prayer across different languages, cultures, faiths and experiences.
The International Camp brought together participants from countries including Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Malta, Palestine, Syria and Tunisia, alongside others from Europe, Africa and the United States. Christians, Muslims, Jews and Druze met around this year’s theme, EDU-Care: education understood not simply as learning, but as a process inseparable from attention and care for one another.
Living together did not make difference disappear. Sharing everyday spaces was itself initially difficult, while linguistic barriers and conflicts affecting participants’ countries inevitably entered the encounter. The final document is strikingly candid: the participants do not claim always to have succeeded. What they describe instead is the attempt to see one another first as human beings, while allowing different cultures, experiences and spiritualities to remain present.
Perhaps this is where the experience becomes particularly significant. Dialogue was not understood as convincing or being convinced, but as allowing another person’s perspective to broaden one’s own. Even disagreement could become part of the encounter.
For ten days, difference was therefore not something to solve, but something to inhabit. The challenge now is to create other spaces — large or small — where people can meet and remain with one another long enough for something new to become possible.
