Youth Group

One of the main projects of our pre-service training was starting and working with a youth group. Our group started out pretty rough; two kids showed up to the first meeting and none came to the second. But we rebounded nicely and, with the help of a nice teacher at the school, soon had a great group of 15 kids who we met with every tuesday and thursday afternoon. The ultimate goal of the youth group was to develop and produce an agribusiness product using local resources. Two Fridays ago we had a product fair at a local restaurant and each of the 10 youth groups had a table to show off their finished product and have a short presentation.

I think that our group probably experienced more difficulties in preparing for this fair than most. Without one amazing girl, Helia, I doubt we would have even had a product to present. We somehow managed to pull it together and made some delicious banana and coconut flavored cake. Five kids came to the product fair with us and it was adorable seeing how nervous they were to present in front of everyone. I can’t quite describe how proud I felt watching these kids talk in front of everyone and answer tough questions from the judges. Although they were disappointed we didn’t win, I think they all learned something from the process, which I had doubted for a while.

Our last night in the training town, we met with the group and took them all over to the local Eskimo (ice cream shop). We bought them all ice cream and gave them certificates and seeing how truly grateful they were had quite an effect of us. They wanted to take pictures with all of us and asked for our email addresses and phone numbers. A few of them said some really nice thank yous as we left. So much of our training experience was rushed and chaotic and stressful that we had forgotten to think about what the kids experienced.