Compliments of the season to you out there, we sincerely wish all the Christian friends of the Sharing Education and Learning for Life (SELL Programme) a Merry Christmas. We hope and pray that you will have a joyous and a very peaceful celebration, especially those of you living in the North – East of Nigeria where there have been recurrent attacks of Boko Haram Islamic Sect. 

The training in Kumasi on the 9th – 18th of December was the second in a series of the proposed four trainings of facilitators of the SELL Programme for Kumasi in the Ashanti Region of Ghana.  Jonathan, one of the facilitators from the SELL Resource Team, gave this report on the training; this year it was hosted at the Institute of Catechises and Rural Development (ICARD), and participants from two communities in Kumasi town took part in the training. They are the New Tafo and Adukrom Communities.

The training was facilitated by Mary, James, Leo and Jonathan. The units of the programme that the participants were trained on were the Spirituality and Peace-Building Units. Though about 24 participants were initially expected to take part in the training, they all could not make it  due to the fact that schools in Ghana were still in session at the time of the training. As most of them are teachers, they could not leave their teaching posts to come. We were however in touch with them and hope that they will be able to take part in the next training.

Highlightsof the training were the Prayer service in honour of our Ancestors in the Spirituality Unit and the Anger Management Session in the Peace Building Unit. The participants also experienced the use of the Problem Tree as a tool of analysis of conflicts and exploration of our spiritual history. It was a fulfilling experience for the participants.

Looking at the level of commitment showed by the participants, we are very confident that the SELL programme has come to stay in Kumasi Ghana. After the Training, they committed to running at least four workshops in their respective areas before the next training. They will also be meeting as the Kumasi SELL Team once every month to review their progress and make future plan. We pray and hope that this spirit will continue in them and the resource team promise to support them anyway we can.

The next training has been scheduled for August next year and new contacts has been made with some groups in Kumasi, we will bring you details of this later.

We thank the Irish People, who have supported this training through support from the Irish Embassy. We are also grateful to Augustine and Valentine both members of the Society for Africa Mission, who have been the local coordinators and hosts of the SELL Programme in Kumasi.

We will keep you updated on the programmes there as they run it. 

From the SELL Family, we say have a blessed yuletide season and an awesome New Year, until next week.

Maria Dagogot,

Communication Desk, SELL.

On Monday 28th November 2011, when I walked into the premises of the Youth Formation Centre (YFC), where the SELL programme runs from, I found it very quiet. Not as if it has always been noisy but psychologically I knew that not all the members of the SELL team were around. As I walked pass the gate and to the office, it was only Moses one of my colleagues that I saw all the rest were busy preparing for their trip to Ghana even though Leo has already reached there. Jonathan, Mary and James were going to join him there before the weekends. Their trip to Ghana is not for relaxation but to continue with the training of facilitators which was started in August 2010. Even though Jonathan and Mary are having a little challenge with their health due to the change of weather from summer to winter, they are still preparing in earnest for the training.  I wish them a speedy recovery.

Last weekend, Jonathan and James were in Gombe State, Nigeria to mentor Felicia and James Odiba members of the SELL team from Gombe. The unit of the SELL workshop that was delivered was the Community Building unit of the SELL Programme. As reported by James, the group found the issue of gender equality very challenging which brought up very healthy discussion. At the end, most men in the group stepped down from the position of being the man and always in charge to be supportive of the women. Some of the men said ‘we are all made equal by God’. Participants at the workshop were 28.

Every 1st December is World AIDS day and  People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) are being commemorated.  Different groups do it differently. Some carry placards around singing and preaching against stigmatizing PLWHA. Others act dramas, commentaries are being read in news and for some it is seminars. As for us in the SELL Programme, it has always been through workshops and we have not relented to preach against stigmatization and how to prevent the spread of HIV. This year’s World AIDS day was celebrated in style, even though we had no workshop to give on that day, Moses and I had our red ribbon pinned on our breast pockets, we gave everyone that came into our office compound that day a red ribbon to pin on. Our solidarity with PLWHA doesn’t end on this day because we will always create awareness on issues around HIV/AIDS in our workshops and spread the news that HIV/AIDS is only a medical condition and that people that are infected can still live a normal and happy life; only if we show them love and encourage them to seek for medical support.


Upcoming events.

The SELL training of facilitators will start on the 9th and end on the 18th December 2011 in Kumasi, Ghana. 

On the 9th December 2011 Moses and I will be going to Jos the capital of Plateau state, Nigeria to mentor the SELL trainees from Jos as they deliver the Social Justice workshop in Jos. Hopefully, this will be our last workshop for the year but I guarantee you not our last blog update.

Stay with us.

Maria 

Communication Desk, SELL  

As the year comes to an end, members of the Sharing Education and Learning for Life (SELL) Programme are very busy with evaluation and planning for next year’s Programme. The evaluation and planning has not stopped the team from running the few workshops remaining this year.  Like I mentioned to you last week that Jonathan and James of the SELL Resource team will be at Sabon Gida in Taraba State, Nigeria to mentor the SELL team from Jalingo with their Community Building workshop, it was quiet a success. They reported that the facilitators who were Dominic, Freda and Stanley were faced with the challenge of which language to deliver the workshop with because the participants were a mixture of 3 major languages; Tiv, Fulani and Jukun. The participants were astonished by the style of facilitation and ask if some of them who have interest could be trained so that they will go to their villages and work with the young people there. They appreciated the workshop and hoped the programme had lasted for a week. Number of participants was 21 out of which 4 were female. 

Leo also a SELL Resource team member, after mentoring the Minna team in their Personal Growth workshop said that the Minna SELL team is becoming very strong and have identified a few persons for the SELL facilitators training. They also had a record of 21 participants comprising of 14 female and 7 male. It would have been a bed of roses for us if there were no challenges as the ones we are experiencing at the moment. During one of our recent previous updates, you were informed that the programme’s vehicle broke down when members of the Sell Resource Team were coming back from a facilitators network training in Jos. Last weekend when Leo was coming back to Bauchi from Minna, just around Jos an accident occurred between him and a motorcyclist. At the moment that I am speaking  to you there is no vehicle in the compound for journeys to workshop. Just like Jonathan and James travelled to Sabon Gida on commercial transport, a journey of sixteen hours (to and fro), they will still take that risk again to Gombe for another mentoring this weekend.

You were informed that on Tuesday 22nd November, A resource team from the Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and Catholic Agency for Oversea Development (CAFOD), both from Abuja, were going to come and help the SELL team with some strategic planning, with a view to repositioning the team for a better future. CAFOD couldn’t make it to come because of an urgent pressing need that needed their attention. The Strategic Planning also opened our minds to other creative approaches to doing things. On behalf of the SELL Programme Team, we appreciate Mr. Chris and Ayo who came from CRS to do the planning with us. 

That same day at about 16: 30 GMT the end of year Evaluation and Planning for 2012 took place with the Youth Chaplains of the Province of Jos, covering Five States in the North East, Nigeria. During the evaluation, reports were given by the chaplains on how the programme was run in their areas. We also discussed how to make things better in the coming year.

Jonathan and James are already in Gombe this weekend for mentoring of Community Building by the Gombe SELL team. We wish them well in that endeavour. Another mentoring was to take place at Tudun Wada Malima, around Tafawa Balewa area of Bauchi, but due to logistical reasons, the area team called the office to say the workshop is postponed to a later date. 

What am I forgetting? Oh yes I remember, this weekend the SELL family has two birthdays. On 26th November, a resource member of the St. Patrick’s Priest in Nigeria, who supports the Team, with workshops, facilitation, teambuilding, mentoring and translation among others, Tommy Hayden shall mark his birthday. Also on 27th November 2011, Moses, a member of the SELL team shall also be marking his birthday. On the same day, Moses and Ann (his partner) shall be taking their baby, Ofara to the church for dedication. We wish all of them a fruitful celebration. See you next week. 

Maria

For the SELL team