CIVIL held a public event on the topic “Can we together?”, where the benefits were discussed of when different communities work and live together. The event was attended by activist Lisa Bauti Shaqiri, actress Vladanka Dimkovska and Vanco Ordanoski, business owner in the IT sector. The event was moderated by Diana Tahiri, CIVIL.
“Business is governed by rules that are different from the ordinary living. In business there is a rule that business exists in order to make money. In the most part, employees are selected in regards to whether they will fulfil the role of fulfilling the job and of being a good worker”, said Vanco Ordanoski, business owner in the IT sector, at CIVIL’s public event on the topic “Can We Together”.
“Ethnicity and culture are though somewhere in second place. However, I think that diversity at the workplace absolutely contributes to the well-being of every business. That mixing of cultures, different ways of living only enrich the work environment and everyone learns from one another as every culture has something specific about it. I have felt with collaborators from abroad that this difference enriches the work, makes the work easier and richer for some experiences. In business, the job has to be done, that’s the basic criterion, but businesses that are multi-ethnic are better off financially and people are more efficient in their work. For example, the young executive of Google, he is Indian, and because of his ability no one sees the color of his skin. In regards to diversity, for example, the CEO of Apple is gay, he openly talks about this, and again he is the one after Steve Jobs, and who raised the value of Apple by 3 billion dollars.
All big companies have to take measures to improve the diversity of their company, and that contributes to the situation, the atmosphere and to how the company is turned towards the world. In addition to the internal well-being, the company is projecting a state of diversity, of unlimitedness and progress, and that helps the company to do its business.
In Infoproject, we deal with development of software for big companies. We have never made a software that is not multilingual. My company is also making efforts to be in that trend of diversity, of accepting that culture that will be easier for users to use’, said Ordanoski.
“When acting, sometimes we play virgins and sometimes we play killers. Acting teaches me every day to respect diversity. I experience the world through acting. We all hurt equally, we are all from flesh and blood. We make the same texts, just in different languages (Macedonian/Albanian). Often on stage we communicate through emotions, sometimes we don’t even have to talk”, said actress Vladanka Dimkovska at CIVIL’s public event on the topic “Can We Together?”.
“I was in Belgrade this weekend at a play, and there we were all from the ex-YU space and no one spoke about the wars, about the problems, but rather about equality, about coexistence. My motto is that there are no borders”, she added.
“In these past 5 years I have been an active student in psychotherapy and that helps me understand the things I did before and that I did naturally, now a theoretical background is given to them. When we talk about multiculturalism, non-discrimination, about accepting diversity, from a psychological point it can be said that it is a need for contact”, said activist Lisa Bauti Shaqiri at CIVIL’s public even “Can We Together?”.
The need for contact is equated with the need for eating, drinking…
In the contact with ourselves, we will see that we come into contact with different people. In our existence, we can be different. We react differently to good things and we react differently to bad things, and this way we learn to accept the diversity in ourselves and at the same time we learn to accept the diversity of others.
We have this naturally, to want and to be able to live together. In the social sense, regardless of the basis of diversity, we should live together, and that has led to us living together in the same place, but in parallel. We are different in million ways all the time. We need to live together and nurture the diversity”, she outlined.
The debate is part of the Initiative “Make a Difference: Respect Diversity”, which is implemented with the support of the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs of the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg.
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Dehran Muratov and Irena Krdzic
camera: Atanas Petrovski
editing: Arian Mehmeti
Translation: N. Cvetkovska
