From the Riverside School in Lyndonville, Vermont, USA:
The Riverside School "hearts" OWYP!
We loved hearing the good news that our All About Us Package finally arrived in Nigeria, after 5 weeks of waiting. It sounds like Creative Ambassadors had fun and learned a lot in opening it. We also received letters, pictures, and beads from them and have since linked up students as Pen Pal Partners. We had lots of questions about whether students were boys or girls, how the grade levels work in Nigeria and how their club is a part of their school. We'll write back this week.
We're calling the recent and coming weeks our "information gathering phase," so that we can be well informed when we brainstorm, choose and plan a service project. We celebrated World AIDS Day on Dec 8 by listening to a local radio call-in show on the subject and taking some good notes about the disease. We then invited who runs the local AIDS service organization, Vermont Cares, to speak to us about what the challenges of being infected or affected by HIV are to people in our area. She gave us lots of good information and many ideas for ways to help. We'll probably be able to follow up on more than one, in addition to doing something on a bigger scale.
Now we'll catch up on OWYP curriculum by reading and discussing the personal story of someone living with HIV in South Africa and asking Creative Ambassadors to share with us the answer to their Community Survey in the January curriculum. Hopefully from these activities we'll continue to gather information about the nee! ds in other parts of the world.
This project is tying in nicely with the curriculum of our History class: World Issues and Current Events. We're studying Africa right now and so are able to make lots of connections between what we learn about the Continent from texts and newspapers, and what we learn from our new friends there.
Thanks for all you are doing!
Nelia Dwyer 8th grade teacher, The Riverside School
From the Miracle Corners of the World Trust in Songea, Tanzania:
As you know we firstly joined One world youth project in September last year. And since we had that membership opportunity we first learned and introduced to the group members what is One World Youth Project.
From there we started classes and learned things accordingly to the each month curriculum.
On the beginning youth learned the meaning of culture and its impact in their daily lives. It was very exciting topic because some of the youth didn’t even have any idea about what is culture?
Then in November youth learned the ways on how to set goals for their lives and their communities. On one of the classes youth had a chance to watch the film/documentary about One World Youth Project.
In that time of November the group was able to establish joint cooperation with another local youth group from a certain street known as Mateka, it’s a group, which is based on educating young people about HIV/AIDS and other diseases through arts and drama and songs, the group is called JUHUDI.
In the mid of November some of the group members were able to participate on a-one-week-seminar, it was organised by the ministry of healthy. And its main target was to create/to give youth the ability of understanding the importance of the gender equality and social healthy awareness.
On the 1st December, which was the AIDS day, the group members participated on the one-day workshop organised at Majimaji stadium in Songea. The group members were assigned to teach the STD’s transsimission and STD’s disadvantages.
As per December curriculum, the youth learned how to format, the “time line of their lives”, “free-writing” and “a day in the life of you”.
The group has also taken some initiatives considering the MDG no 2. Some of the youth have had an opportunity to visit local villagers and have group discussions together on the matters, which make most of the children out of school while they were supposed to be at school, and other different issues concerning education.
Just few weeks ago after big number of schools being already opened, we realised some of kids didn’t go to school. So we sent three of our youth members to go and visit those kids’ families. On one occasion a certain old woman said and rejected to bring her grand son to school just because no body gonna take care after her when the grandson is at school!!
Thanks! The student leaders of Songea!
From the Cape Cod Regional Technical High School in Harwich, Massachusetts, USA:
Our group has been pretty busy so far this year! We have been writing letters to sister school friends in Tanzania and sending messages on the OWYP forum. We also have been collecting children's books to send to Tanzania to help our sister school learn English. Some students participated in a Barnstable County Human Rights Academy workshop that involved students from all over our region (Cape Cod) getting together and discussing human rights issues. In December, we presented a program on human rights to the students and staff at our school. Students presented on Darfur, UN MDG's, and listened to a guest speaker from Tibet. Our final speaker was OWYP founder, Jessica Rimmington, who spoke to us about the power of youth leadership and how we can all make a difference. For the new year, we are planning a food drive for a local food bank and a week-long event on diversity and human rights for the school in April.
Take care, Annie Dolan-Niles, teacher Cape Cod Tech
From the Youth for Human Rights Chapter in Paynesville, Liberia:
On Friday, January 26, 2007 YHRI Liberia Chapter was invited by the William V.S. Tubman High school to elaborate on the 30 human rights articles through the PSAs, which contains the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Upon receiving this invitation, Mr. Thomas Mitchell, Country Director of YHRI Liberia Chapter was accompany by two of his officials, Mr. Boersen Hinneh, Program Officer and Mr. Abraham Massaquoi, Financial Officer.
During this human rights and clubs orientation awareness, sixty four (64) students attended YHRI Liberia awareness on the PSAs and Human Rights Club orientation and twenty five (25) students signed YHRI Liberia Chapter petition to implement the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The PSAs video was the focus view of the day, while Mr. Mitchell only explained the importance of human rights as relate to the PSAs. YHRI Liberia is making arrangements through the William V.S. Tubman High School to establish a human rights club for students to participate and exercise their human rights.
Students and school administrators really appreciated the idea and awareness held in the auditorium of William V.S. Tubman High School, located on 12th Street, Sinkor.
Thanks for reading this report.
Thomas P.Mitchell, Jr.
Country Director
YHRI Liberia Chapter
From the Simba Friends Foundation in Teshie, Ghana:
The summary of activities we have undertaken earlier are as follows:
On the recent meeting of Simba Friends Foundation Club, Teshie Group which took place Saturday 10th of Feb. 2006 on Teshie Presbyterian Campus, we discussed all the 8 MDG's with more emphasis on MDG 2 which is our main priority in terms of our Community Service Project. Even though we also did talk about the other Goals and how best we can deal with them we also talked much about them so that we can advise others also when we are asked to talk about them.
We also discussed about our community and asked the questions found in Group Leader Handbook concerning setting of Goals. After this we also came out with the concerns / problems of our community and some of them are as follows:
1. Lack of portable water and easy accessibility of Water: With this problem one has to wake early in the morning to search for water daily to be able to get some to bath and prepare for school or work, since the flow of water is not adequate. For instance in my(Adonis) home which is the residence of the Late wife of the Teshie Chief, the water flows once in two weeks and recently for the past month its has not flown. Thus making life very difficult for my family and me, the other tenants and the community as a whole.
2. High rate of youth unemployment: This problem is attributed to the fact that most of the youth lack of education, skills and knowledge on how to apply the talents they have. As a result of this most parents are not able to send their wards to school after completing their primary education because lack of funds to cater for a secondary education, However primary education is free and but other needs like school uniform continue to be a hindrance.
3. Low Standard of Living: This is very heart breaking when you come and have a look at the standard of living in our community (Teshie), I have discovered that this is due to lack of education on health maintenance, sex and environmental sustainability. Talking in terms of health maintenance combined with environmental sustainability you will realize that due to lack of Urinary and Toilet facilities most of the youth and children are most found defecating in the gutters and any where they find suitable for themselves and also the dumping of refuse is just an "eye saw" for instance after a clean up exercise has been done instead of the rubbish being collect to be deposited in the right place they are left for fowls and other animals like dogs and goats to come and scatter them all over the place thereby making the “work done x 0 which automatically is equal to 0% work done, because anything x 0 is equal to 0”.
Secondly in terms of education on sex, Adonis said “that there is something one must do about this because the level at which people (especially the youth) in my community are giving birth it is pathetic. I will talk much on it later on because it is also another problem”.
“So putting all the above under "problem 3" into consideration the standard of living per an individual with reference to the water problem as stated earlier, life becomes unbearable and you could only see a few people who are very organized and know what they are about doing well in terms of their standard of living to which I could say my place of abode is part since it is Chiefs wife's residence but looking around you could just judge for yourself”(Adonis Statement).
4. High Rate of Child Birth: This is another major problem that hinders the community of Teshie, this is because most of the youth do not have much education on the sex and thus taking sex as a hobby and practice it virtually every minute or hour,one of the members of SFFC remarked. Could you belief that on one of our recent research on this problem we discovered that a 14yrs old girl has already given birth to 2 children and currently caring the third in her womb, astonishment was drawn in most off our faces when we heard the news. This was due to lack of education on the part of the child parent and herself. So as a result of the population of Teshie keeps on increasing day by day and life becomes more difficult and unbearable for residents.
5. Lack of Environmental Sustainability: (which I have explained earlier).
6. Lack of Educational Facilities etc.
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