#MMN Berlin Workshop Feedback

One month on… Migrant Media Network Workshop
My major takeaway and suggestion… from the participants themselves

It made me realize how seriously the migration issue really is. When we watched the interviews with the woman and the trafficker in the film Bushfallers, it struck me. The woman talked about working 24 hours and she looked like a smart, educated woman to have fallen into the trap.

The key word from the workshop for me was consciousness, thinking about the unintended consequences like the story of the woman who was posting photos of her fancy, good life. But in reality, she was sharing the opposite of what she was living. This person was needing some help but where was that support to come from?

I say to include more real stories from real migrants, from real people who have been through the journey. There’s more intensity and seriousness when somebody tells their own story because it’s more relatable and people get lost in numbers. When you don’t have that person or story, you need very high statistics to tell others that it’s indeed a problem.

I suggest more real-life scenarios and to practice different interventions on certain social media posts. It’s not enough to tell someone not to go, but necessary to offer a solution or an alternative. We can all help on a micro-level and not just wait on government and the macro-level to act.

The workshop wasn’t clear-cut on how to tackle the migration issue, but more so, raising awareness of the problem. I wonder how we can help people who are on the way. There should be opportunities to stay back at home, and we can all support those endeavors.

I would want to take lessons from the videos we watched and the stories we heard. Many times, the stories are based not only on poverty but also on greed.

Human beings are not static beings. We are born just a few centimeters and we grow within ourselves, there is movement and that movement needs to manifest itself outside to explore new places.

Migration is not a problem but a solution to a human desire to explore and to grow, and we need to do it much more conscientiously.

Written by Nicholas Bruce