All the Cool Kids are Doing It: Service Learning

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -Margaret Mead

April 22 marks Global Youth Service Day. Here in Buenos Aires, we be gettin' our volunteerism on early this year....

Today was one of those days when I felt genuinely proud to be a Peace Corps volunteer, and reassured me that perhaps something impactful and sustainable can come from a collaboration between myself and my community. This job provides me with countless opportunities to share meaningful and dynamic experiences with young people, and I am truly thankful to be able to observe and learn from their creativity and fresh perspective. For the past few months I have been working on a service learning training program which combines several of the resources being used by Peace Corps today, but in what I hope to be a more comprehensive, user-friendly manner. My ultimate goal is to have a document (or set of documents) that can be given to any other peace corps volunteer, community leader, teacher, or young adult, and allow him/her to train others in the design and management of service learning projects. Service learning is different from community service in a number of ways, namely that it involves a much more involved process of assessment, research, analysis and follow-up than simply completing an act of community service. As a result, participants are able to achieve more profound learning objectives and gain much more, both personally and intelectually, from the experience.

The materials I've been working on were put into use for the first time today. Along with the help of my friend and fellow volunteer Chamisa, we trained 19 leaders from 6 different community youth groups in the concept of service learning and the design and management of service learning projects. The idea is that they will go back and train the rest of their respective youth groups in the methodology, complete a project action plan, execute their projects, analyze the results, and come together in July to share what they did and what they learned with all participants from all of the other groups by means of creative presentations. The final event will also be a way to celebrate their successes and discuss follow-up plans for the projects.

The training today went extremely well, and even though it lasted for 5 hours, the most commoon feedback I received from the participants was that they wished it had been longer! It was inspiring to wacth these young people working so diligently and in such a collaborative manner as they made plans to improve their communities. So often society tries to take power away from them, and with so few opportunities to do something positive with their time it's almost no wonder they seek refuge in drugs, violence and unsafe sex. It pains me to hear adults complaining about the negative behaviors displayed by young people here, as if those same young people are completely at fault. In most cases, it is the adults who are at fault for neglecting to provide these youth with opportunities to make positive contributions to society. If young people are not given this power they are not likely to become aware that it exists on their own (and in this adult-run society I cannot blame them). Okay but before I get too off topic, what I loved most about this workshop was that the young participants were so participative, articulate and creative with their ideas, excited about the potential to make positive changes in their communities, and enthusiastic about sharing the information with their peers. I am definitely looking forward to providing support to all of the groups as they train their other members and design and execute their projects, and I expect the closing activity in July to be something quite memorable for all. Together the 6 groups cover every different part of my own community, plus Chamisa's neighboring community, so the hope is that the projects cover a lot of ground.

I have several more trainings to do (including all 98 11^th graders from the technical high school and all of the teachers from three different elementary school), and getting the first one over with has been an extremely beneficial experience (the stress nearly killed me, but I'm a firm believer that what doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger). I hope to write soon with updates on my other projects. It looks like water and definitely a bridge will be coming soon to the shantytown (fingers crossed! Knock on wood! wear your pajamas backwards!…..), and my 150 kindergarteners are probably going to be fluent in English by the end of this year (that was a lie but the stuff about the shantytown was true). Lots going on as usual, but I plan to make service learning my focus in this second half of my service. Pura vida!