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Cultural Migration in Autobiography Grundtvig Partnerships 2009-2011

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

e-mail: kszia@komesnet.com.pl http://cma.internetdsl.pl

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My experience Ineta Endele

Thanks to our active coordinators, I had the opportunity to participate in the project "Cultural Migration in Autobiography ". It was a work with personal documents, including stories, diaries, letters, photos and family history. The older generation people life stories are important, interesting and also difficult material for biographical researches, for several reasons. The older people have experience of all the most 20th century important events - the both World Wars, Soviet occupation and the restoration of Latvian Republic. They have had to live with changes brought by these events. My characters of the story reveals a certain testimony and details of events that makes it possible to see historical events through the development of the human experience and everyday practice. Woman, whose biography I wrote, is my former colleague. When we worked together, she talked a lot about her life, childhood and adolescence. Now she is retired, and we do not meet each other every day therefore, we talked about her life at home. At first, her story was very short. I asked her to show me pictures of her life. Looking at old photographs conversation was more lively and began memories. Photos that she showed me were very old. They were seen many times, therefore looked a little worn out and crumpled up. Each photo had its own story. After each conversation I wrote down from the microphone recording the facts and my feelings. After conversation I had more questions. After the questions, I felt that my story hero thought, I am really interested in her life. Stories became more detailed and interesting. The life story gave me view into her everyday life’s history, showing how people adapted to radical changes during their lives.The biggest benefit of this project was to meet and successfully cooperate with different people around the world, whose current residence is in Europe. This experience encouraged me to continue my life-long learning. I am grateful to Mr. Nowak and our project coordinators for this invaluable experience