Vranje – The youth basketball club "Play 017" from Bujanovac presented in Vranje its project "Let's be Tolerant", which is part of its sports and social mission,  in an interesting manner. 

By panel discussion "The Role of Language in the Shaping and Building of Inter-Ethnic Relations," Nenad Stajuc, the President of the club, along with his associates, showed why the youth basketball club "Play 017", which has over 200 boys and girls gathered in several groups, was something unique in the area of South Serbia.

“Club members, Serbian, Albanian and Roma boys and girls, take every opportunity to get closer together, and this time they showed it by using linguistic magic, " it was said at the panel discussion.

Speakers at the panel discussion on the linguistic possibilities of bringing young people closer together included Aleksandar Nikolic, a teacher of Serbian at the “Branko Radicevic” elementary school in Bujanovac, Jelena Randjelovic, a teacher of Serbian at the "Sezai Surroi” elementary school in Bujanovac and Goran Arsic, a court interpreter for the Greek language.

Part of the team of speakers were also Enkel Redzepi, a teacher of the Albanian language and literature at the "Ibrahim Kelmendi" primary school in Presevo, and Almir Selimi, a sociologist and the editor of the Serbian newsroom at TV Tirana, who became a TV news presenter for the Serbian minority in Albania thanks to his previous dealing with the basketball played by the youth basketball club "Play 017."           

The aim of the project is to educate young people from different ethnic communities of South Serbia and to strengthen their activism for the purpose of democratic processes in Serbia and promotion of EU integration.

The implementation of the project and the panel discussions, which will, apart from Vranje, be  held in Presevo, Bujanovac, Vranje Spa and Surdulica, was  supported by the US Embassy in Serbia.

Source: Vranje News and Coordination Body