I just had a 3 hour meeting with the other animators doing the Junior Youth program. It's so amazing how this program can be so, so incredibly astounding and at the same time so frustrating - and it's all part of growth!
On one hand, we learned how a lot of the problems we're facing now can be dealt with by reading our Ruhi Book 5 again and we heard from a Junior Youth Coordinator (the person who deals with the animators [like me and Sunil, for example] who went for a 3 week training course in the Phillippines (I know I probably spelt that wrong, it's a bit too late for proper processed thought, lol) and she said how the JY program we have now consists of 6 books but by 2011, there will be 12 books then 18 books to be completed in the space of 3 years. It's so incredible to think about, but it's most definitely not impossible. What really excites me is that the newer books that are being tested have passages from other religions too!
And then we talked about the problems we're facing now and one of the things we're really, really having trouble with in our JY gatherings is a language barrier. Imagine taking a fully English book to a Tamil speaking community and trying to explain a concept like "confirmation" to a group of 12 year olds. And I can't speak Tamil! And even the other groups were having the same problem. Then Juan (my old animator - he used to take me through the JY program) talked to us about how he had to conduct his gatherings in Cambodia. They had to use props, mimes and endless repetition to get the message across.
Gah, all in all, it's not impossible, it's just very difficult. It is sometimes difficult to deal with kids who can't read or write (there are kids like that here, in the city too) or who have really, really poor grasp of a language. It makes me feel like I'm not good enough or I'm not the right person to be helping this group. But then I see the changes that have happened in my group (which I totally don't credit completely to myself. I'm just a facillitator of the program). Just the other day, I had to conduct a gathering with both my group and another new group because their animator wasn't around and before going in, I told my girls that I really need them to show the boys what it was like to have a JY gathering. Normally, they're really, really, really shy around guys but on that day, they just had fun and they were very helpful. After about half an hour, the new guys got out of their shells and they were asking questions.
Overall, I'm really glad we got to have the meeting, there's so much to learn from other countries!
Today, Ally is content.
