On Friday, we held our first Youth Camp and it was a huge success! We’ve been working up to this event with our group of youth leaders since the beginning of Community-Based Training (CBT) and it feels good to see how far both the youth leaders and we trainees have come since Initial Orientation. I’d like to dedicate this post to sharing (as concisely as possible) what we’ve done in CBT so far: the skills/tools we’ve learned, the projects we’ve done, and my day-to-day life as a CYF Peace Corps Trainee (PCT). *Warning: long post!
Youth Assembly
The Youth Assembly was our first interaction with the youth of Barangay Tabing-Ilog during the first week of CBT after spending the week making courtesy calls to the Municipal Hall of Bagac and the Barangay Hall of Tabing-Ilog. It was just an hour and a half session of games and activities with about 40-50 youth of ages ranging from 5 to 20. It was a brief introduction to what it would be like to organize an event in the community, mobilize youth leaders, invite participants, engage with Filipino youth, and implement something in the community. Needless to say, we had a plan A, thought about a plan B, but really had to go with plan Q. We had so much to learn.
PACA (Participatory Analysis for Community Action)
After that first week, in our technical sessions we would learn various skills and tools during the week that lead up to a related big project implemented that Saturday. In our second week, we prepared for our PACA, a community development tool that focuses on two core elements: conducting activities with different groups that make up a community and bringing everyone together to develop an action plan. For our PACA, we worked with youth ages 12-24 in our barangay who are in the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), a government program that provides conditional cash grants to the poorest of the poor, to improve the health, nutrition, and the education of children aged 0-18.
To invite youth to our PACA, we trainees – with the help of members of our Barangay Council – went door-to-door and asked for parents’ consent for their children to join us on Saturday. At our PACA event, we divided our youth by age groups and involved them in the following core PACA activities to help us get to know the community:
- Community Mapping: the youth were asked to draw their community from their perspective sharing the places most important to them, most visited by them, etc.
- Seasonal Calendar: the youth were asked to fill in a calendar with significant events that happen each month such as holidays/festivals, weather changes, heavy working months, shortage of work months, harvest season, etc.
- Daily Schedule of Activities: the youth were asked to share their average daily schedule from wake to sleep.
- Needs Assessment: the youth were asked to brainstorm the needs of their community and brainstorm potential community projects to be implemented together.
As a group, the youth decided on repairing the community basketball court (super popular here) as their community project, but since the mayor had already allocated funds to do that, we went with their second choice: conducting a singing and dancing workshop (also very popular here!). As a result of PACA, the youth also elected 12 youth leaders from the community whom we would work with for the remainder of CBT.
V2 Volunteerism Initiative
The community project was also our opportunity to implement our V2 Initiative, the theme of the following week’s training. V2 is part of Peace Corps’ capacity building effort, a major factor in our approach to development. The idea is to engage youth in service learning in order to support volunteerism and provide participants with the skills necessary to collaborate with their community and inspire others to do the same after we leave. Therefore, the emphasis of the community project was that it was their project, not ours.
During the week, we met with our youth leaders several times to discuss what they wanted their singing and dancing workshop to look like. By engaging them in the decision-making process, they are exposed to the steps necessary to implement a project. We split our leaders into a singing group and a dancing group. The dancing group put together a dance routine and the singing group decided on two songs to sing: “Ikaw” a popular Tagalog song by Yeng Constantino and “Let It Go” from Frozen (Frozen is so loved here). We were to be there only as support on the day of the project and the youth leaders rocked it!
Training of Trainers (ToT)
With the community project under our belts, we began to prepare for our next big project, our youth camp, an opportunity to conduct life skill sessions to our youth. In preparation, the following weekend, we conducted a Training of Trainers session with our youth leaders to foster peer leadership and education. Not unlike the States, peer education is most effective here as well ifnot more effective, because of the language barrier. The youth decided on a health and wellness theme for their youth camp so thus, our Youth Camp came to be called “Let’s Get Physical!: Health and Wellness, Tabing-Ilog Youth Camp.” We came up with four related life skills to train the youth leaders in: Oral Hygiene, Coping with Stress, Physical Education, and Diet and Nutrition. Each lifeskill presentation followed Peace Corps’ guidelines for facilitation called 4MAT which consists of:
- Motivation: a fun energizer or icebreaker related to the topic
- Information: provides the details and important content of the session
- Practice: take the information and figure out what we can do with it in an interactive way; usually an activity or group discussion
- Application: allow participants to show off what they’ve learned and how they will apply it in the future – AKA the “processing phase”
I, along with Liza and Mallory, worked with four youth leaders in presenting the Coping with Stress session. Our leaders, Daisy, AJ, Hanna, and Jopet, were incredible and so great to work with. We gave them the basics of the presentation and encouraged them to make it their own and they definitely did. Jopet, who was so shy in the beginning, really opened up and we were so proud seeing him completely owning his part of the presentation at Youth Camp.
Youth Camp
Our Youth Camp was held at the beautiful Fajardos Beach Resort. There’s a typhoon passing through Northern Luzon this week (we’re in Central) so we’ve been having monsoon rains (which also means that for the first time since arrival, I’ve felt cold and actually sleep with a blanket). It is because of the weather that we were able to truly learn the bahala na (come what may) culture of the Philippines. In the morning, we conducted our lifeskill sessions in 30 minute rotations so each group presented four
times. After the first time, our leaders had pretty much mastered it and for the rest of the morning we pretty much didn’t have to do anything but be moral support since they had it under control. After lunch, the trainees took over and put on a carnival-esque afternoon of games and activities including relay races, minute-to-win-it games, art booth, face-painting, videoke, and tshirt decorating. We had hard rainfall on and off the entire day, but a gigantic downpour early in the afternoon forced us to move everything inside, canceling about half of our activities. But we improvised and everyone still had fun. The kids had a blast playing in the rain and it was great to just spend the afternoon with them having fun. This was our last activity that we get to plan with them 😦 We have one more project scheduled – Youth Development Sessions – but that is pre-planned for us. I’ve enjoyed getting to know our youth and am so proud of them. I’m learning so much from working them during CBT and am looking forward to applying everything at my permanent site.
Pictured here is us with all our youth leaders! I’m so sad to be leaving this community in two weeks. Our CYF sector will host big recognition ceremony to celebrate the youth leaders from all three barangays before we leave.
Time is going by so quickly. Tomorrow is our Language Proficiency Interview (LPI), our long-awaited language test that determines whether or not we will be moving onto learning a local language or if we will continue learning Tagalog. Afterwards is our permanent site placement announcement. Big day tomorrow!
My Average Daily Schedule
6:00AM Wake up and get ready, call Jared
7:00AM Breakfast
7:30AM Meet up with Emma to walk to class
8:00AM-12:00PM Tagalog Language Class
12:00-1:00PM Lunch
1:00-5:00PM Technical Session, which consists of presentations from visiting Resource Volunteers (volunteers from the last batch who have been in country for a year) or Peace Corps staff from Manila (ie. PC Medical Office, Safety and Security, etc.). Otherwise, this is the time we spend planning and preparing for our weekly Saturday activities with the youth.
5:30-6:30PM Youth Leader Meetings – a few times a week, we’ll meet with our youth leaders to plan for the Saturday activities.
7:00PM Dinner with my host family, followed by a nice, cold tabo shower and will read or study Tagalog with my Ate before getting ready for bed.
9:00PM I’m usually in bed by this time and will call Jared before sleeping around 10/10:30.
Saturdays 8AM-3PM is the usual time frame for our big youth projects. Afterwards I usually just relax at home and/or go out with my host family.
Sundays are our days off. I usually Skype with my family and Jared in the morning and then go out with my host family for the rest of the day.
Jac in the Philippines 