I am Lilly, a pupil at the Fritz Grewe Grammar School in Malchin. At the end of February last year we had an exchange with pupils from South Africa. At that time the focus was on climate change. But I have to say that what was more special for me was getting to know people from the other side of the world and seeing how similar we are. Although everyone has their own biography, we are all teenagers, who when it comes down to it, have exactly the same problems. But to some extent they also have a different fate than we do. They are confronted with different things than we are. They lost their parents because of drugs, crime or illness and as the result of a lack of infrastructure.

Before we arrived the South Africans had really thought about what they wanted to show the Germans. One pupil said that he wanted us to understand why they live in shacks, that is in tin huts. We also worked through this and none of us were aware of the history. And it was very, very interesting to realise how they were totally stricken especially during the corona virus period, when they weren't able to isolate themselves and weren't as well-informed as we were. So we talked a lot. And we didn't always talk about climate change, but often just about life: How we go to school, what we experience and how we go out with friends.

But we only really reflected on the whole thing when we were back home. We boarded the plane when the temperate was 30 degrees and arrived here at home in sub-zero temperatures. My body couldn't cope with that very well, and it was only afterwards that you started to process all these influences and simply become more aware of the fact that you live a very, very privileged life. That we have a roof over our heads and a door that we can lock. A boy in the project also told me that he has eight dogs at home that are only there to protect them.

In South Africa, we planted a permaculture garden with the company The Sprightly Seed. They introduced us to the topic a little. And then we built this permaculture garden together at Rosendaal High School. And for me, the best thing there was when we were finished and it was no longer so formal, we painted stones and each bed was given a number. And during the break, all the pupils from the school came and painted the stones with us. For me, what was really, really special about this exchange was that we became one unit.

We recorded this climate change song. And while doing this we got to grips with the topic of climate change in a more extreme way and thought about it in a different way.

To do this we all met up at our hostel and had a short workshop with Jabulani. He first played us some of his music and then taught us a bit. He asked both the South Africans and us to work something out ourselves. For example, I found one line of a text very interesting: "The gardens of our hearts needs to change". I thought it was very fitting for the permaculture garden, and the fact that "change" refers both to climate change and to racism which means that things simply have to change. We had many different lines that we simply wrote together and everyone did their own bit. Some of the South Africans then rapped short parts and I also really liked this line "Maybe we could make it change, we can fight" because it showed this cohesion once again. We can make a change, but only together.

This partnership was really something special for me. It really showed that it doesn't matter where you live. Just like this line "Let us live in harmony". So simple. Why are there wars? To question all that. We could all live so happily together and that gave a lot of us think about. This songwriting contributed a lot to the fact that we all took a much more reflective approach. It was really something very special. This song brought us all a little closer together again

And then, just under six months later, the South Africans came to us. And during that time, we had re-watered a moor here, for example. And of course the main aim was to irrigate the moor again, but for me the main point was that we all worked together and created something together. That was really something special and I thought it was really fantastic because you really had this sense of togetherness.

We had an extreme experience in Germany: when we wanted to change trains at the station, there was someone standing there who was running up and down like a rooster and always looked at us in a strange way. He spat on the floor and behaved very unpleasantly. You could just tell by looking at him that he was really on the right. It was just like telepathy when Sabina and I both stood in front of the South Africans at the same time. He kept on muttering totally racist things, was aggressive and tried to make himself look important.

And you really noticed that the situation didn't suit him at all. He had a real problem with the fact that there were black people there. He couldn't deal with it at all and we don't normally have that kind of experience in everyday life. But we also experienced totally tolerant people. For example, we visited my great-grandmother and my grandparents and my great-grandmother was really happy. You often think that it is the older generation who think like that man, but that's not the case at all! I would guess that the man at the station was about 24. People always say "Yes, the old ones, the old people", but it's not always the older generation. You can see that now. When we were in H&M in Neubrandenburg, a man kept on looking at us in a strange way, he didn't say anything, but you could tell he was looking sceptically and his eyebrows were furrowed. And I had never experienced anything like that on my own.

But these situations have shown that it really is constantly there, only that we don't feel it all the time. And it showed me once again that you mustn't keep your mouth shut, that you have to say something about it and that you can't accept it and say that you have to take people as they are. No, you don't have to. And that became very clear through the exchange, especially during the time that they were here. Because we mainly travelled to tourist destinations in South Africa where there were a lot of Europeans, it wasn't so obvious for us. Of course you noticed it a bit in the townships, but that was it. It wasn't that extreme for us because people with a lighter skin colour were simply always seen as more privileged and, above all, cleaner. I think that's also a point and a way of thinking that people simply have to get rid of.