Mekong Minority Foundation, Chiang Rai
Today, I met with the director of the Mekong Minority Foundation and the youth team. Lucky for me, they were having a youth leadership retreat this weekend, which they graciously invited me to. And tomorrow, we will test one of the modules with the youth leadership team. The youth leadership team is comprised of about 30 university-age students, almost all of whom are leaders of clubs and youth groups in their various communities. Ten of the 30 are also Milagros scholarship recipients (Milagros is the organization this whole toolkit was first designed for). The MMF youth team has worked with this group over the past 3 years on various leadership topics the students generated. Today, they were working on group process. It looked like a very engaging session; the main activity I observed was a debrief on a mama soup making activity (each team had to make a bowl of mama (instant noodle soup) without using anything from the kitchen or electricity). Fortunately, they realized during the debrief, they had all grown up in the village so they could all make a fire in under 2 minutes. Pretty sweet life skill.
After that session, I got to spend some time with the youth team–the youth leadership team’s adult advisers and they looked over the toolkit. It got very positive reviews–in fact, they wanted to take it and photocopy it on a xerox machine, because, as they put it, this is Thailand, after all. While training on how to use would be useful, they said the main thing would be to translate it into Thai. Translation is 90% of the battle. Once that occurred, they would be good to go. They are a very skilled facilitation team, so training is probably less important for them.
It’ll be fun to see what tomorrow brings when we try out the first module!
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