Hello Guide friend!

After a fairly restful night's sleep (although Miriam's mosquito net fell down four times), we were all up early ready for the start of a new week of training. After a quick trip to buy some fruit from the fruit man up road- we got some apples (very exotic!)- we headed off to Guiding CHQ. Unfortunately, when we arrived it was all locked up and we had to wait outside until someone came with the keys. It has been very hot today and so we all adopted our Caribbean stance- hands on hips and legs a good distance apart- to keep as cool as possible.

Once we were able to get inside the building we were a little disappointed to discover that no girls had turned up in time. We waited for an hour, which gave us time to prepare all of our resources and do a bit more planning. Eventually a few Guides arrived, which made us very excited because we were able to get started.

Today's focus has been on Advocacy. This is a challenging topic, especially when we are training girls who are aged between 10 and 22. We did not have enough girls to split up the group and so we got creative with our training methods instead.

Amelia started the session with a letter hunt of the letters in the word "advocacy". The girls then had to spell out the word and think about its meaning. However, we did not reveal what the word we wanted them to spell was and so the task was a little bit more challenging than the girls were initially expecting. With a little bit of leader input everyone finally spelt the correct word. The rest of the session was spent explaining advocacy and ways in which the girls can successfully advocate.

Miriam, Clare and Jess did some rather hilarious role play of different scenarios which displayed good and bad advocacy skills. These involved Miriam and Jess shouting at Clare for dropping litter on the floor and some conversations which started- "Hello Guide friend"- when Jess and Miriam were displaying some better advocacy skills by putting up posters and writing letters to the Guyanese government. The girls responded really well in the following discussions and we all really felt that they learnt a lot! Communication games, including an epic game of human knot, took us up to lunch.

We continued with the advocacy theme after lunch. We had to recap some of the things we had covered in the morning because lots more Guides arrived. We are not complaining; it was really great to have a bigger group! :D We covered methods of advocacy by playing some fun games and then went onto some small group work. Deborah discussed with the girls 8 areas that the government could spend money on in Guyana, including health, education, infrastructure and welfare. They then had to allocate 100 million Guyanese dollars to the eight different areas and explain why they had made the decisions they had. The girls were very eloquent and it was really interesting to see the different opinions of the girls.


Finally, we ran an election. The girls split up into different groups and had to come up with a party name and logo, three policies that they would implement if they were elected to the government and a speech to explain their choices to everyone else. Some of the girls really came out of their shells and got very passionate about their campaigns. We were all so impressed!!! We got everyone to fill out a ballot paper and then we counted the results and announced the winner. The winners were ecstatic :D.

Deborah, Miriam and Amelia went to Nigel's supermarket and did a BIG shop. Hopefully we will not have to shop for several days now as we have plenty of supplies. The highlight of the evening was Eileen, Mrs P's friend, teaching us all how to make Roti. She was so helpful and the results tasted great with our curry tonight.

We are just planning for tomorrow's programme training session and then we will probably play some Monopoly Deal.

LOGL

Team Guyana
xxxxxx