Peer Educator Workshop

After visiting the Adolescent Program on all five of the fields, it was time to take all the information I had gathered and do something with it. We decided that I would design and run a workshop for 15 Peer Educators (1 boy, 2 girls from each field) and the five Adult Facilitators. There were two objectives to the workshop. One was to bring the PE's from the different fields together so they could get to know each other and share some of the skits, and songs they had written to use with the lessons. The other was to take the suggestions they had made about which subjects needed more lessons, and to teach them how to make a plan for writing a lesson: to define the problem, the intended outcome, and the method. Because there was so much interest in dowry, we decided that would be the subject they would work on. They also got experience working with people they don't know because we put them into three groups of five, each with one PE from each field. The facilitators worked together as a separate group.
In the morning we played ice breaker games, shared skits and songs, and then, after explaining the tasks, everyone spent an hour working in their groups. After lunch each group shared their results and we had a wrap up session. The PE's decided that they would like to collect all the skits and songs into a booklet that could be used as a supplement to the lessons and agreed to have all their work in by the end of the month. We suggested and they agreed that I would take what they had written and, in consulatation with Sanjay and Rina, write a lesson on dowry that they can then try out with their Adolescent Participants.
The evening of the workshop, when I was thinking about what we had done and how it had gone, I had the idea that actually the facilitators would be the perfect people to write the lesson. They know the youth the best and they had also been though the workshop, so I proposed and it was accepted that on Thursday I will give a mini-workshop with the five Facilitators to help them finish the process we started on Saturday and actually write the lesson. I have gotten to know four of the Facilitators quite well, as I have been teaching them English twice a week for three hours. I am finding it all very exciting, and it is so much fun to see them all; Participants, Peer Educators and Facilitators so excited about learning new things to share with their groups and their communities. (Note: I spent 3-4 hours trying to put captions on all the pictures, but just couldn't get it to work properly, so you'll just have to enjoy the pictures by themselves!)
We played a game in which each person thought of a descriptive word that begins with the same letter as their name and then did a corresponding action, i.e. I said "Mighty Mindy" as I flexed my muscles. then everyone repeated it. They had a blast!