Since September about nine of us in a group within Amnesty International at the University of Bergen have been working on getting the Human Rights Week together. There are nine other groups in Amnesty UiB and most of them will be doing one lecture during the week.The week starts tomorrow with a concert outside at 'Festplassen', with five up and coming bands. Between the bands we'll have speakers such as the principal of Bergen Uni and the general secretary of Amnesty Norway, to name a couple. During the evening there's a salsa course and dancing all night.
The concert starts at 1pm tomorrow but we'll show up between 8:00 and 9:00am to set up the stage, the huge metal 'boxes' with exhibits from the groups (four of them in total, adding up to more than 800 square feet), do the sound checks, show the artists to the room the hotel is lending us and serve them their requested coffee, coke and pears.
After the show, hopefully over at 4:00pm, we'll be taking down the stage (and it's not exactly small), removing the boxes and clearing up. Then at 9:00pm it's salsa night!
Then every day from Sunday through Thursday we'll have two lectures a day about human rights and human rights violations, with topics such as:
- Introduction to Human Rights
- Russian Nationalism
- The situation in Burma
- Free speech, or lack thereof, in China
- Discrimination of disabled people
- Torture = Terror with focus on Guantanamo
and a lot more. All lectures by people who know who work with these topics, coming in from around Norway and abroad. The different groups of Amnesty UiB will help with lectures.
Friday is the last day and we'll be having a human rights pub quiz. I think it's safe to say the members of Amnesty, and especially those of us in the group making this week happen, will be kicking back and enjoying ourselves.
And you betcha we're gonna win that quiz!
- if you're Norwegian and in town, check out www.menneskerettighetsuken.no
