I feel like a few words should be said about the participants of the camp. About people from Armenia, Ukraine, Turkey, Georgia and Russia.
As an intellectual, I feel like I should know something of a country I travel to. Something about its people, its mentality. I take differences for granted and smile at similarities, like ‘Huh, that’s unexpected’. it’s just easier to live when everything is classified and people, relations and notions are just attributes in a huge Excel sheet of life. But then again, when we feel wrong, when there’s a problem to which we can’t find solution, what is it that we do? We turn to others for similar experiences. And it’s the difference between the person you turn to and yourself that makes the solution more potent or simply persuades you it’s okay to be this way, okay to struggle or search for answers. That search of empathy is sometimes much more important than the magical solution. So coming back to the notion of being an intellectual and classifying my experience and differences between people, I feel like I should change it. As an empathizing person, a total newbie to Georgian, Armenian, Turkish cultures, I discover people not to find differences, but to find similarities. This way maybe we can solve our major problems, maybe we understand ourselves better. Before coming here I thought that a Ukrainian shares with Armenians, Turkish and Georgian people less than with Polish or Belorussian, but here I am, writing this  on the second day of the camp, trying to convey a comprehensive thought about our similarity. I was wrong to divide us by countries. A whole bunch of things has happened since out arrival. For example, I sometimes forget that my neighbor Gayaneh is Armenian and ask her something in Ukrainian, to which she responds just fine in English, signifying that she got it. Around the table Turks understand some Armenian speech and Russians and Ukrainians speak about the origin of borsch and oppressive regimes. The thing is we are not different. We come from different backgrounds but we are the same, our problems, our secrets, our struggles are so relatable that after a sharing experience exercise, we were not just Ukrainians, Armenians, Georgians… We’re writers-to-be.