Ani Choying Drolma visits Bal Mandir and Mitrataa hosts Life Skills Brainstorming session

Another busy week for us at Mitrataa last week!

At Bal Mandir Children’s Home . . .

The children had a fun-filled Saturday with 3 very special guests. Girish Giri kicked things off by showing his documentary film about a Nepali football team which travels to India for an international football competition. The team came second and did Nepal very proud! Girish entertained the kids by sharing his experience in making the film – including that it was made for less than $10!

Then Ani Choying Drolma, well known Nepali Buddhist nun who has recorded several albums and who has the most amazing voice, hosted a singing session for the kids. Part way through she was joined by famous Nepali composer, Nhyo Bhajracharya, and a wonderful hour was spent singing and enjoying their company.

We are so grateful to Ani Choying, Nhyo and Girish for giving up their precious time to spend the afternoon with us. We all really enjoyed it and will remember it for a long time to come.

 And in other Mitrataa news . . .

One of the core aspects of our Dream Centre program is teaching the girls skills for life. We have developed our own manual for this program. Knowing there are some wonderful people and organisations out there also teaching life skills, we invited a hand-selected group of 12 like minded people to join our team for a day of brainstorming to share ideas and experiences about teaching life skills. We were also happy to be joined by 3 of the occupational therapists from the UK who are working with Mitrataa for 2 weeks. We explored questions of:

1)    What is in our Life Skills Toolbox? What skills belong in there. This was really interesting because we had a discussion around whether skills such as budgeting belong in the toolbox and came to the conclusion that they definitely too. Financial literacy is a crucial part of preparation for an independent life;

2)    How do we learn life skills? We turned the general question of how do we teach and switched it to a learned focused approach of how we learn the skills. We discussed Howard Gardener’s Multiple Intelligences model and then the participants gave us an opportunity to be students by teaching us one life skill using the different intelligences. We all came away with new ideas for our teaching!

3)    What does success look like? Measuring the success of our programs is always a challenge. You can’t tick the box – we’ve taught gratitude and now she is grateful. It doesn't work that way! So we exploring breaking each life skill down into a series of observable behaviours which would result from someone who was able to use the skill. We are compiling these into a document for all participants to share and test so we can build on it over time.

4)    What can this new network do in future? Mitrataa is all about the power of networks. Now that we have created this network of passionate life skills facilitators, we wanted to work out how best to use it in future for everyone’s benefit. We discussed having regular sessions on different topics, creating a resource library that we can all access online and also a Facebook page for us to share ideas and ask each other questions.

5)    How can we improve next time? We ended the day with a PMI on the session – Positives, Minuses and Ideas for next time, to help us grow and host even more effective sessions in future.

This was a really interesting day and I enjoyed meeting some interesting new people and there was a lot of food for thought. I am excited about the possibilities and opportunities this new Life Skills Working Group can explore. Thanks to all the participants for their passion, energy and engagement. It was fun!