‘Super powers’
Maite and Lucas conducted the second training with the team of Ruwwad Jordan.
It's so lovely to see how the volunteers of Ruwwad have developed since our previous training. They started to implement music activities in their children programs already. They work with the children on active listening, working together and communication. Being able to use music is a great added value to the skills they already have.
We've shared the story of Ruwwad before, in previous newsletters. Ruwwad Al-Tanmeya is a non-profit community development organisation that works with disenfranchised and marginalized communities through education and youth volunteerism. The youth volunteers are being offered a scholarship to study and in return they serve the community with teaching children voluntarily. We support the development of the youth scholars in becoming strong community builders in their own community.
During the first level training with this group, we've composed this song together:
Make your dream come true
Be different in any way
No one can judge you
We all love you this way
Hand in hand with our values
We enrich our society
We walk the hard road
We walk the whole road
To build our country
To make the dreams come true
Your differences complement us
And the music enriches us
We were touched by these beautiful and honest lyrics. These young community builders want to make a positive change in their community. So this week we decided to compose a song about superpowers.
The next day we did an interview with one of our trainees. She said: "If you would ask me again what superpower I want to have, I would say: the magical power to stop wars. (...) All countries around here - Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya - are in war. And even though Jordan is in peace, we also have problems with ISIS here. There were bombings not too long ago. It makes me feel scared to be honest. (...) We need the society to become more open-minded, especially in East-Amman, where Ruwwad is based. We need critical thinking, creativity, empathy and active listening in the schools here, so there will be less violence."
Our trainees shared many personal stories about how they grew up in this area and why they want to make a change in their community. These stories help us to better understand the context of where we work and design our program towards the needs of the people we work with. Want to read more stories? Besides these newsletters, check our songs & stories section.
