Goal of the event:
The goal of the event was to put the students in the shoes of someone with some kind of visual impairment. We picked an activity that doesn't require any kind of special cappabilities such as eating, so that they could experience how it woul be to do the same but deprive of one of their senses, the sight.
Short description of the event:
We first booked a space in a youth club where the dinner would take place. ESNrs met a hour before the meeting point and started to prepare the meal and the distribution of tables and chairs before the participants arrived.
At the time of the MP with the exchange students, we explained how the activity would be like and blindfolded them outside of the room. One by one students entered the room with a coordinator as a guide. Once they were all on their seat coordinators started serving the food and drinks. During the dinner they had the chance to meet people sitting next to them without knowing anything about how they looked like.
Once they finished their dessert, we let them recover their vision and discussed about how it felt. Both coordinators as ""waitress"" and exchange students as customers learnt a lot on how a person with low sight may feel and some of the difficulties that they may encounter in some daily tasks or when interacting with other people. We realized that we aren't aware of how much do we rely on our sight!
How did your event go?:
The result of the activity was really satisfying. Participants were really happy of being part of this experience and encouraged us to do more activities in this line. For next time we would like to find a space with better accoustics, as this one became very noisy even if the tone of the conversations was low.
