It is SO good to have this case study featuring child action from Sri Lanka sent to me by a colleague at Plan international. Thank-you for sharing it with me and with the readers of this blog.
If others have stories, photos or videos to share please contact me and I can feature them on this blog. It is stories like this that keep us going!
Children Make the Adult’s Lives Better:
An Experience from Children attending Children’s Clubs in Ampara, Sri Lanka
This story is from children in a children’s club in Damana MOH area which is situated in the Ampara district. This children’s club was not just a traditional children’s club in which the children only sing, dance and play. They went further with the vision of creating a “Happy Village”. There are many successful achievements but this story illustrates some of them.
“We formed this children’s club with only 8 children at the beginning. Our mothers did not seem very interested in sending us to the children’s club at first. We discussed about this in the society thinking about what reasons may be causing this. We thought that mothers did not see any specific improvements or changes among us by being a member of a club. So we tried to address this issue strategically. We then tried to help our mothers by engaging more in household work like sweeping the house and helping her with cooking. We tried to demonstrate the love we had towards our mothers and that we cared for her.
During this, we found that it is not easy to work in the kitchen for a long time due to poor ventilation in the kitchen and stagnation of smoke within the house during cooking. This is when we realized that if it is difficult for us to stay in the kitchen for this little time how it could have been for our mothers. We could also link this to the occurrence of some illnesses among mothers and young children in the village. As small groups, we visited houses in the neighborhood in the village and built up simple chimneys (dum kawulu) in these kitchens, while doing certain other healthy changes like changing how the cooking salt was stored in the kitchen.
During the visits we felt that our relationship with the elderly people of the village was not very strong and that they were not happy about themselves. Because of this we wanted to make them happier. Therefore, our club arranged a special day to make the elders happy. We invited all the grand mothers and grand fathers to this event. It was a surprise event for the elders, where they got the opportunity to sing, dance as well as to play as they did it forty, fifty years ago. This event sparked enthusiasm among the elders to engage in play activities once a week in the village grounds. We also organized a health promotion camp for the villagers and measured height, weight and calculated the BMI of the villagers.
We also found that the PHM of this area did not have a proper place to weigh the children. She did that using a branch of a Jack tree to hag the weighing scale. This resulted in very little children getting irritable and PHM could not weigh them properly. We went to the nearby forest, brought things, and built up a mud hut to weigh the children. The fathers who saw this work also helped us build this. After that, we found that this hut is not strong enough. We noticed that the old community centre which had been poorly maintained could be used more effectively for this. We got together, cleaned this area, painted the wall, and painted pictures on the wall. There was only one of us who could draw on walls nicely, but this did not prevent others from trying our hand at this. After this, we realized that there were eight of us who could draw fairly well.
With our participation at the club, the experiences we got helped built up our skills in broader range of subjects. Slightly older colleagues (adolescents) learnt new ways of discouraging alcohol and tobacco use among peers by informally addressing tobacco and alcohol issues in their groups.
Engaging in these activities has also resulted in increasing the number of children from eight to forty within a little over one year time period.
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