Workshops

The second week of our 2-weeks of holiday madness with our teens was great. We hosted workshops in public speaking, study skills, job interview skills, and ended with a speech contest. The 40 students started the speech workshop terrified to speak in front of others, but throughout the week and after lots of practicals we had 11 students compete in our speech competition. I was SO impressed at the variety of their "influential topics" and how well-prepared they were. The 6 winners will travel around with Cassie Carstens and a Brazilian soccer team as they talk to the local high schools here. Here is a picture of me speaking about speaking...

On the first day of our workshops after the public speaking portion we partnered with a group called Shout it Now who do HIV counselling and testing. They brought to our centre 50 laptops and showed the teens an interactive "MTV-style" interactive video about testing. It was a great programme and we hope to partner with them again in the future.

Service Projects

During the two-week school vacation, we were very busy. Our teenagers led the children in Kids in the morning and then after they fed the kids lunch, they had a chance to attend special teen activities. In the first week, our teens hosted "service projects." The service project teams were split into 4 groups: Cleaning parks and streets, cleaning schools, serving the sick and elderly, and appreciation of community heros. I led the appreciation team. In 1 week we baked 16 cakes and made 16 thank you cards for our community heros like the police, fire department, NGO's, social workers, doctors, nurses, orphanage workers, etc. The kids and teens then got to tell their community heros how much they appreciate all that they do. It was really special to hear the kids express themselves and how the people were so touched to get a thank you and a chocolate cake. The fire station were so pleased that they gave us a ride around in the fire truck until we were dizzy. It is so easy to show appreciation, but we so often take the time. Our young people learned the value of a thank you and we hope that the value of gratitude will follow them in their lives.

Kids Games

During the 2-week school vacation, we hosted a lot of special programmes that we would not have had the time to present during the normal school year. For 2 weeks we arrived at the office early and set up for a morning of Kids Games. Kids Games is an international programme that pairs games and fun with life lessons and experiential learning. We focused on the themes of serving each other, love, working as a team, respecting people and property, forgiveness, and honesty. We started each day with a drama to illustrate the theme and then our teenage youth leaders took the children in their team on a journey to experience the theme for themselves. We averaged about 200 children each day and saw the growth a huge success!