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| My Team! |
Well, learning was enough now it was time to play something
really like a game-game and there we came forward to play the “name-game”! That was
quite simple. You divide two teams each containing equal participants. You put
a barrier between two teams and have to select one member from each team who
will be participating in this game. The task is simple. Two of them will sit in
front of each other though they will have a barrier of paper or curtain between
them so that no one could know who might be the person sitting next. On the
count of three the curtain will be dropped and the person who could tell the
name of the person sitting in front of him first would win. This includes some
elimination and cheating and every sort of element which is necessary to be in
a game!! LOL
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| Taz Zaffar is at playing the "Name Game" |
It was not clear which team actually won the game but it was
a real fun for sure! We were trying to select Sri Lankan participants because
their names were so hard to remember! I wanted to participate once but a
participant from UK named Sarah Javid refused my proposal saying “you cannot go,
everyone knows your name!” I remembered a little talk between Maya and I during
our breakfast while I was wondering if anyone could recognize me as I was
wearing a Salwar Kameez. Maya simply said, “Who wont recognize you?”
“ Trust me, you have made an impression!” she added. So I
gave up the idea of participating at all. No one wanted their team to lose!
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| The AC (Active Citizens) River |
The sessions went on in full speed. We had the session named “AC (Active Citizens) River”. Well, we attended this session previously when I attended my training of Active Citizens in Bangladesh but it was different. It was different, because, till now we had drawn the river on papers with color pencils and this time, we went outside and discovered a huge river was made on the ground with pebbles which even had some fish (made by paper ofcourse!) in it!
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| James is taking the session |
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| Nilusha Paranavithana |
We were divided into teams and our task was to find out the
qualities of “vision”, “me”, “me and you” “we together” and lastly, “SAP
(Social Action project)”. We discussed together
and finally each team had to share the most important or memorable thing
we had learnt through Active Citizens. In this sharing I remember a story of
Nilusha Paranavithana who studied in Social Work in the National Institute of
Social Development and side by side she was also working for the development of
children and welfare. She was passionate about working with children and had
also done an internship at SOS children’s village in Piliyandala. That was a
story related to her internship at SOS while she was working with children. She
had a very bad experience there and totally broke down and was in deep
frustration. She did not want to come back or to work anymore, but it was the
story about how the friend of her Active Citizens circle encouraged her and
gave her support to come back and to work again. Active Citizens was not only
about “I”, but also about “you and me” and “we together”. When we are Active
Citizens, we had to care for every single person around us because that was how
we grew the sense of responsibility at first towards one (that’s you and me),
then a group (that’s we together) and finally the community (that is where we
begin the social action project).
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| Sharing Experiences |
Seriously,at that moment I did not even know that I had
learnt and carried so much from my group, my ISV team. But after getting back,
these all make sense one by one. And every time I feel the sense of gratitude
to British Council for providing me with this opportunity and my ISV team to
allow me to mix up and to know so much about them.
(To be continued)
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