Youth in Peace and Development (YIPAD)

I have been attending these YIPAD meetings with 2 of the boys in my house, Steven and Junior, because I can’t help but be drawn to working with kids. The purpose of the club is to show kids the importance of education and let them know about their rights and role as children. They do things like awareness activities around Damongo and surrounding villages on HIV/AIDS and malaria, etc. Since I have been here, we haven’t worked on any of those things, the meetings have mostly consisted of a whole lot of lecturing about the need for discipline and commitment…at which point I saw a great opportunity for a place where I can contribute. Here we have a group of kids who have good intentions, are able to commit this time to come to meetings and an opportunity to become great leaders but it is being squandered on useless talk about who will arbitrarily bear the title of president or who has paid their money for a t-shirt or an upcoming trip. Even if I don’t change the way REP operates and help 100 small business owners, I know how to work with kids.
Sitting down with the group leaders I told them that I have had a lot of experience working with kids in Canada and could teach them leadership and teambuilding games so that the kids would want to be committed. They would feel committed and respect each other more because they would feel that they are gaining something by coming to meetings, other than just being lectured. They want me to help them secure an office and computer, but I want to help these kids as much as possible. This organization definitely has a lot of poptential, and has done a lot of good things already...but I have learned that I can't strive to drive huge organizational changes in 5 weeks...I need to keep my sights closer to the ground, thats where I will have the most success. So drawing on my years of experience working with rambunctious children, I slipped so easily back into my camp counsellor role.
Before the meeting start (which is usually an hour or two after the kids are told to arrive) the kids play games…football (soccer) is popular among the boys, the girls play a game like hackey sack with leaves tied together with some plastic, there is also a game like tag where you throw your flipflop at someone to become ‘it’, a game kind of like moneky in the middle except opposite, you try and arrange and mess up a pile of flipflops while avoiding getting hit with a ball (made from a bunch of rubber bags), or climbing up in the shea trees to shake down some of the fruit to munch on.
There are about 25-30 who come out to meetings…the first thing I tried with them was a song with actions. That went well. Then I tried the ‘clap to shut-up’ trick…if you can “hear me clap once clap back…” that worked wonders, instead of trying to yell at kids and threatening to beat them. The next meeting I tried the “human knot” to have the kids working together to solve a problem…it was a bit disastrous. The kids had fun and it was a start…but these games are pretty foreign to them! Breaking off into groups, working together to solve a problem…you mean you aren’t just going to tell us how to do it? It was really interesting to see the result of how children are treated here. The education systems and attitude towards children and their education are very different in Canada. I think that there is still the attitude that by virtue of going to school, a child is getting a good education…but the way they seem to be taught is how to do what they are told. Creativity and self-discovery are not encouraged…from what I have observed so far.

At our next meeting I had them break off into groups and come up with skits/plays demonstrating the importance of education…and it was a great success! I was so proud of the kids, and even though it took them a while to understand what they were supposed to do and step up and do it, before long they were huddling in their teams coming up with new and better plots and performing in front of the other groups. Though they could learn a thing or two about facing the audience, not talking over each other and projecting their voices, they did well for their first try at something like this! It was interesting that the person who had the hardest time grasping the concept of what we were doing, having the kids be creative and work together to come up with their own play, was the group leader. He had a hard time not going around and dictating what the kids should do. Maybe an individual quality, but maybe how he is used to interacting with kids…the mentality that if you are older you know better. This is one of the cultural aspects I am struggling with. I think its important to respect your elders, but more importantly respect should be based on what you do and how you act. If you show up hours late for a meeting and are distracted the whole time, that’s disrespectful, so why should you receive respect?
Working with these kids has given me a really valuable insight into the culture. How children are treated and behave leads into the type of citizens and society you will have. From what I have seen at my office, the attitude that I find frustrating…not wanting to try new things, take risks or push the status quo…can very well be connected to the mentality engrained in childhood years. Anyway, I am going to keep staying involved with the group and try and learn as much as I can from them, and teach them as much as I can, because with kids there is hope for the future!
An extra Bonus is the Wagashi, the Afrcian cheese, that we have been stopping to pick up on our way home. It is mild like mozzarella, but deep fried like saganaki...very tastey.