following on from a discussion the other day about how everyone makes judgments all the time about people and whether or not we’re aware of our own prejudices got me thinking about how some prejudices are accepted and some are not. So heres my ranking system for ism’s!
So all of the above are generally accepted as not being acceptable. What about the following - how acceptable are they?! Continue Reading »
We traveled to Malawi intending to use a similar model to the one we’d used in Tanzania - working with an International School to do work with children from local schools. This time though we wanted to be a bit more adventurous with our training!
We started by doing some group development activities with children from the International School. One of the biggest challenges here was that Malawian culture still has a very traditional approach to men & women. When we got onto talking about leadership and asked a group to decide upon a leader, I asked them why they’d decided on their leader - what qualities did this person have? “Well he’s a boy” came the ‘obvious’ answer along with an obvious kind of shrug!! (This despite the fact that Continue Reading »
On Tuesday some of us are (hopefully!) spending the evening at a tented conference centre in Worcestershire. I say hopefully because over the past couple of days much of Worcestershires been on the news featuring helicopters airlifting people out of floods!
I’m assuming they’ve chosen their location well so that its not subject to the weather - if not it effectively writes it off as a potential venue for us anyway! Lets hope not though because it would be brilliant to get some outdoor based courses back into our programme. Continue Reading »
Although I’d heard of the term ‘youth participation’ I’d never really took much notice of it until quite recently. There are lots of these sorts of terms - community engagement, social exclusion, active involvement & so on & so on. Cynically I’ve tended to think of this kind of jargon as mostly used by people in an attempt to give what they’re doing credibility and people that spend too much time discussing things rather than doing them. Certainly at the time I was far too busy doing things to spend time wondering about what to call it!
Our training evolved and developed largely from just getting on with it - its not true though to say that we didn’t have our own jargon and there definitely had been a lot of planning before we started. Continue Reading »
I’m not sure why I started thinking about this earlier today but I started pondering what confidence actually is and how you would explain it. My thoughts were that being confident is to have the feeling that you can deal with situations - then I thought it was also having the belief that even if it turned out you couldn’t deal with a situation you would still be able to handle not being able to deal with it (now I’ve probably lost you!!).
I think confidence is one of those things that everyone just takes for granted - not necessarily having it but understanding it - its a word that people use easily without giving much thought to what it actually means. Continue Reading »
I realised I should explain the ‘Breakfast Society’! At one point we really did intend to form a Breakfast Society. The idea began after regular trips to the Blue Moon cafe in Chester down by the river to experience their all day breakfasts. The first time we went to the Blue Moon on ordering our breakfasts we were told to expect a 45 minute wait. We decided we didn’t mind waiting - there was a cool old jukebox playing very old music and we’d managed to find a seat so all was well.
When the breakfasts did arrive they were well worth the wait. After that we decided we’d set up the Breakfast Society. Continue Reading »
In Tanzania all of our work was based with schools. We linked up with Tanga International School to work alongside their senior students and together organised a couple of days training with local school - Sir Johns Primary. The International Students all spoke English (though none of them were native English) and most of them also spoke Swahili. After a couple of days training up the International Students we then ran a days Sports & Games Course followed by a day of Performing Arts with about 100 children from Sir Johns.
What we hadn’t realised was that there was a timetable clash and so the Sir Johns children were actually still supposed to be on holiday! We also hadn’t anticipated being followed by a TV Camera Crew for two days - but it seemed we’d created a bit of a stir and so East African TV came Continue Reading »
Interview with Ernest Pondeponde in January 2007 about the Grace Orphan & Disabled Care Group in Zomba, Malawi following our first visit there.
