Jinja – day 9

 

Today I ended up dancing with mothers and fathers in a church hall. I had to have a coloured scarf tied around my waist to accomplish this.

 

 

We had visited Bulakabya (for a second attempt) to give a workshop on The Importance of the Family Unit. Sarah, a Lively Minds staff member gave a storming performance which had all of us rolling in the aisle of the church. This was largely achieved by getting them to role play a good family unit and a bad one. The ladies delighted in depicting a drunken husband as he came home and was abusive! At the end, the parents were so worked up that they decided spontaneously to sing and dance in our honour.

We were late getting home.

 

It was a great day which started with our usual briefing from Grace – our leader, and continued as Salma enlightened me on the playscheme games and how they should be played. (That day was Friday and so, being a Muslim, she was dressed in a headscarf.)

Surprisingly the way the volunteer mothers are taught to play the playscheme games has not been documented. It’s all in the heads of the Lively Minds team. So I needed a tutorial. I’m quite keen to see how the same materials can be used to extend what the children learn. It seemed to be quite popular when I did the same thing for the use of the building blocs.

I’m kind of devising my own programme of inputs but I’m also keen to hear from the staff about what they feel they need. I’ve already floated the idea to a couple of staff members.

One thing I might start this weekend is an advice sheet of the good practices in presenting workshops to adults. This might be of special use when Lively Minds begins to expand its programme by training Village Heath Teams to carry out the work they already do. This way they could begin to influence 100 villages or more rather than the current 27.