My internship at the South Caucasus Regional Office of the Heinrich Boell Foundation started in November 2014. As typical for the end of the year my main duty was to draft the annual report for the donor. I had the chance to get to know the entire repertoire of hbf-actions in the South Caucasus, which is quite diverse and interesting. The evaluation of each project gave me a good insight of how Civic Education works in the region and certainly amplified my intercultural competence. Same applies for the weekly team meetings that I was invited to attend.
I also had the chance to witness the joint actions of hbf and Memorial. From time to time I met with historians and other academics to learn about the way Georgian society copes with its Soviet past. In my previous studies I've been working on the same period in Georgia's history. The experiences in Tbilisi added a valuable perspective to my knowledge.
Overall the internship was a good refreshment of skills and competences I used to gain working in an NGO in Germany some years ago. That certainly has helped the further developments being back to Berlin, where I started to work for a project by n-ost, a Network for Reporting on Eastern Europe and border crossing journalism. Within "n-vestigate" we are closely cooperating with Caucasian NGOs and journalists. For the future I might come back to studying the Caucasus and its conflicts aiming to draw conclusions for a better supporting of regional conciliation within the NGO context.
Anyway - the most lasting and personal "achievement" for me is that I got to know ten fascinating colleagues, who are doing their work with a lot of passion. I can still remember our lunch breaks with a good practice of Georgian language and lots of pleasant discussions.