Life Skills, Gardens and indestructible soccer balls!

Wow it has been along time since my last post! Things up until last week have been pretty mellow and I don’t want to bore you all too bad! This last week the Peace Corps gave us some awesome training. Training was held in my host town for all of the SA25 KwaZulu Natal volunteers. The first part of the training was for the Life Skills program. This program is right up my alley and is something that I really want to do with a small girls group. The program is a behavior change approach that focuses on the development of skills needed throughout life. Some of the skills are communication, decision-making, self-esteem building, resisting peer pressure, and relationship skills. It also addresses the important issue related to empowering young girls and guiding boys towards new values. My counterpart Hlengiwe, Rachel, Mdemiseni, and I were able to practice facilitating a lesson on the facts and myths of HIV and AIDS. It was a great opportunity to practice and receive feedback from our peers and facilitators. It was a really great program and I look forward to using it within my community.

The second part of training was held at a rural school about 25 minutes outside of Empangeni. This training was focused on permagardening. This is an amazing way to garden and is a great way to help with alleviating poverty and resiliency for people living with HIV/AIDS. This gardening technique is an easy way to really increase the quality of food and is easy to teach, learn, and do. There are multiple steps to digging and building the garden, but once it is done with proper management, planting and care, weed growth and water loss is reduced by 80%. Digging about 30 cm into the topsoil starts the permagarden, and then you dig into the subsoil. Once your hole is about one meter you fill the bottom with smashed tin cans and sticks, after that you layer will subsoil, newspaper, subsoil, leaves, subsoil, grass and then topsoil. After all of that you can finally start planting your seeds or seedlings. We were broken into groups and we all made 4 permagardens that we put into various designs.

The designs are aimed at keeping the children at the school interested in the gardens. I am glad that we were able to do the training at the school we did because the assistance with food will really benefit them. On top of the permagarden training we were taught about building a compost pile, crop rotation, intercropping, mulching, fertilizing, and all kinds of other cool stuff. I never thought I would know this much about gardening!

Jules and I plan to start a permagarden at the primary school in his village and teach them how to sustain it. Jules had already started an agricultural project in his area so he knew a lot about gardening prior to training with me. I still think it was beneficial for him to come along and I look forward to learning and gardening more with him. The other cool part of this training is the youth from the school were dancing daily and also had a special performance for us at the end.

I loved playing with all of the young learners and they loved having their picture taken! After training we all walked to the local beach about 20 minutes away, it was so beautiful! It was an awesome few days in the village and it had an amazing purpose.

The last part of training was also with Jules and we were taught about a program called Grassroots Soccer. Grassroots Soccer is in the works of implementing a Peace Corps Skillz program to the Peace Corps Volunteers. This program is an amazing way to reach out to youth and teach them about HIV and AIDS while incorporating something they love, soccer. The program consists of 11 “practices”. Practices include icebreakers, small hands on games, and questions and answer time. If the youth attend all of the practices they each get to “graduate” from the program and get a certificate at the end. During training we went through all 11 practices and I feel it is really a great program. Each volunteer was given manuals on how to run all of the practices and an indestructible self-inflating soccer ball. Although soccer is not played during any of these “practices” most volunteers will allow soccer games to be played after practice to encourage youth to continue coming. This training came at a really good time for me. I have been in a little slump from all of this tooth stuff and also the overwhelming sense of a lack of accomplishment. Good news is that according to the PCV mental timeline worksheet I appear to be right on track! These programs are a great way to give me a little kick in the rear and get started on some new projects along with some of the stuff that I am doing at the welfare. I look forward to what lies ahead!