The cooperation between the Sveriges Unga Katoliker (Young Swedish Catholics) and the "Adukatar" Youth Education Center has now lasted nearly a year. The young people from Belarus are mostly Catholic as well. We made friends with our Swedish peers a year ago, when we got the SUK's email address from Vincuk Viacorka. Then, the young Catholics from Sweden first came to visit in October 1998, and we showed them Grodno, Lida, Minsk and Mohylev. Our guests had the opportunity to meet young people of Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic parishes. Then, the idea to widen this partnership appeared, and the Swedish party applied for participation in ForumSyd, which is a Swedish-Belarusian cooperation program - an umbrella organization designed for Swedish non-governmental initiatives. About 40 joint Swedish-Belarusian projects have been started to date.
Within our common program we would like to hold a summer camp and two seminars in Belarus, in which our colleagues and trainers from Sweden would take part. We plan on publishing a youth bulletin and organizing a trip to Sweden for the young Belarusians. We have now accomplished half of what was planned - both our camp held in August 1999 near Grodno and the first seminar conducted in Novermber 1999 were successful. We learnt a lot about the situation the Catholic Church in Sweden is in today, and about the problems bothering the young Swedes, both Catholic and non-Catholic. We found out about our common past, when, during the period of the Commonwealth of Two Nations (Polish and Lithuanian) the dynasty of Vasas ruled both Poland and Lithuania. This predicts a good partnership of the Catholics from both countries. In fact, what keeps the Sweden Catholic church going is the immigrant community, with a significant number of Poles. This is quite an essential fact for our cooperation, because the Belarussians can easily understand the Polish language. For the Catholics in Sweden, the way the simple Belarusian people practice their faith, which saved the Catholic Church from collapse disregarding mass repressions, can be a excellent example to be followed. In Sweden such a model does not exist, and this tradition must revive. I suppose we can help our Swedish friends in this respect. The SUK bulletin has published some general information on Belarus as well as the articles by the summer camp participants. The political situation in Belarus, a very interesting topic for the Swedes, was also touched upon. Now we are looking forward to our next meeting in Minsk in February 2000.
As the Belarusian coordinator of the project, two weeks ago I traveled
to Sweden to present our project to the ForumSyd and the Swedish International
Development Agency workers, whose opinion on the results of our cooperation
was more than satisfactory. Thus, our chances to be successful in the future
are good. We are going to hold our meetings more often and promote our
activities in the other regions of Belarus. We are planning to organize
a meeting of the young Catholics from Sweden, Belarus, Germany and Poland
in Gdansk in the fall 2000.