Meet Zhanara Attomirova, 21, a student in Kyrgyzstan. She says, "I am a peacebuilder who was lucky enough to learn the meaning of this term through the JashStan project funded by the UN Secretary-General's Peacebuilding Fund. JashStan project is aimed at engaging youth at communities in collaborative initiatives with youth leaders, national government, and local self-government bodies to voice youth needs and grievances and seek opportunities for shared and constructive problem solving.

Now I am a mentor for JashStan’s new participants, and I still need to learn a lot with them. My role, responsibilities and duty to the JashStan project is to transmit to others that knowledge in conflict resolution, constructive dialog, advocacy and others which I got with the help of this project. For example, I am able to make little changes in their life by my knowledge on conflict resolving, on getting into dialogue with people and in many ways of preventing conflicts."

"The biggest contribution of our team was the resolution of conflicts between students of five schools in my village through training and events. Their problem was that they lived in different villages and each village was ranking their positions separately. Now they are participating in different projects together, doing social events, two students from different schools wrote their social projects and won, and now they are waiting for our training.

One of those projects was about teaching school students about self hygiene. Another project was to promote Kyrgyz national handmade things and by that social project, they were able to give training courses on how to make handmade decorations and souvenirs from unneeded things."

"Let’s give people a positive viral mood. This is the first imperceptible influence through which we go through when communicating with people. With our energy, a positive outlook on life, we can change ourselves.

I have found many friends from south regions and I understand that the more diverse my community, the better it is."