The “Muros que unen” project is an initiative aimed at primary and secondary school students, which encourages them to reflect on migration and human rights. The program, which was applied during the year 2021 in the departments of Rivera and Rocha, officially ended, ANEP reported yesterday.
The “Muros que unen” project is aimed at promoting awareness of the human rights of migrants and the challenges they face, as well as integration and support for children and adolescents. On this occasion, the activities were carried out in the border departments of Rocha and Rivera. Through different artistic dynamics and recreational workshops, the students experienced an approach to the theme and painted allusive murals.
Participating in the activities on Thursday 12, at the headquarters of the National Administration of Public Education (ANEP), were the president of the Central Board of Directors (Codicen), Robert Silva; the National Director of Education of the Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC), Gonzalo Baroni; the director of Human Rights of the ANEP, Gloria Canclini, and the permanent representative of the Office of the Organization of Ibero-American States in Uruguay (OEI), Macarena Llauradó.
The president of the ANEP Codicen, Robert Silva, highlighted the importance of the role of education regarding these issues. He explained that the initiative focuses on the defense and promotion of human rights, and on the relationship between culture and migration, “a phenomenon that is currently more noticeable,” he said. He pointed out that the education authorities considered it opportune to offer an approach to these aspects to the students, with the objective of generating knowledge and reflections.
Likewise, he stressed that the raison d’être of education is the students, who build their life project. He added that education must play a leading role in this project, not only through learning, but also through coexistence, interaction, “putting yourself in the place of the other” and trying to understand what they feel.
For his part, Gonzalo Baroni stressed that the realization of this type of project reaffirms the cultural integration that the country has and its constant construction, which happens through the people who arrive and choose Uruguay as a place to live and develop. “What we are is in constant construction,” he affirmed.
In the city of Chuy, Rocha, the mural painting was created by young people from high schools No. 1 and No. 2 and from the local technical school, with the participation of children from school No. 88. In the city of Rivera, the mural was created by students from Liceo No. 7, the Rivera Technical School and School No. 140.