This combination of nationalities and languages made the workshop more complicated than the July 1999 one, in which all the participants spoke closely related Slavic languages (though it was still less complicated than our July 1998 workshop, when teachers speaking 6 different languages built a village together).  There was no single common language in St. Valentin de Campolfra, but there were enough citizens who spoke more than one language that there were some funny, unintentional games of operator.  Several times it happened that people’s words were translated back to them by others, having passed through all the other languages.  “Wait!” the original speaker would say, “I know that -- I said it!” or else “That’s not what I said -- who put that in?”

Complicating the matter further was the debate about who counted as citizens in the village, people or peeps.  Who had the right to vote and who could speak at all?  Present were both peeps and people who insisted on their own right to vote and who refused to accept a vote that took away their future voting rights.  This argument led to a long discussion of Village and imagination.  We all agreed that imagination is essential to the program and that the room the program opens up for imagination is one of its best features.  But is imagination better served by considering peep and person as one being, or by giving peeps a separate identity?

Another interesting question that was more discussed than resolved concerned ecology and peep villages.  Peep villages that are outside, obviously, are part of a larger environment -- as some villagers learned to their dismay in July 1999, when a flood washed away the land they’d chosen next to a stream.  Outside villages experience water and heat, snails and chipmunks, for better or for worse, but inside villages are unrealistically flat and empty.  St. Valentin de Campolfra’s citizens wanted something better for their town, so they voted to have a river.  But who was to draw it?  As no one offered to, they chose by lot.  Still, this was not an entirely satisfactory way to get a river.  “How am I supposed to draw this?” wailed Agata, whose name had been drawn.  “How do I know where the river is supposed to go?”  She had a clever solution: holding a pencil behind her head, she drew lines randomly, without looking, so that in the creation of the river there was an element of chance, not just human planning.  But Danielle was still unsatisfied: this could teach children, she pointed out, that human beings could shape the environment to fit their desires.   Was this really what we wanted to do?

Although the workshop had to be short, the group of teachers got their town built, did most of the activities we do in longer workshops, and certainly had plenty of interesting insights into the Village program.  We hope this was the first of many East-West Villages!