Teen Girls

October 17, 2010

Yesterday was the first day of the Teen Girls’ Workshop, which Jaime and I are instructing. We have been putting lots of work into redoing the handbook for the workshop, with me doing some editing and simplifying some of the language (as English is a second language for these girls) and Jaime completely redoing the formatting so that it is much more eye catching and readable.

We had confirmed attendance over the phone for a dozen girls, and the workshop was scheduled to start at 1 pm. This, however, is Uganda. That means that when one says 1 pm, this is taken as a mere suggestion. I’m not saying this to complain, or insinuate that my punctuality is superior, but it makes it difficult to know how long to wait to get things started when people are slowly trickling in. It also gives me an opportunity to work on my laid back-edness, which is becoming more and more highly developed the longer I stay here.

We finally got started at 2:25 pm, and there were four girls in attendance. They informed us that there would be other girls coming tomorrow, so we’ll see what happens today. I made sure to mention that they would be receiving gifts, and a certificate of completion, so perhaps that will sweeten the deal.

Working with Ugandan teenagers is certainly different from working with Canadian teenagers. They were extremely quiet, shy, polite, attentive, and I’m still not certain of how much they understood of what we were telling them. I hope that they understood the majority of it, but they would certainly be reluctant to ask questions for clarification. I’m hoping that they will get beyond some of this shyness the more time we spend with them, especially since next weekend we’ll be talking about menstruation, sex, and STIs, among other things (and it will be a full moon)!

Today we’ll be introducing them to yoga, and I might teach them a bit of massage as well. This should be fun. On Thursday I led the women’s group through an extremely short session of yoga. It was pretty funny. They are keen to do yoga and especially like the pose called Cat/Cow. They get right into it and even do sound effects, meowing for the cat part and mooing for the cow part. I was meowing and mooing right along with them, when I wasn’t laughing of course!