Graduation

Graduation was a little hectic, but a lot of fun. In my community, people do not celebrate graduation from high school or elementary school. They do not often have graduations. So, I wanted to make the graduation from my course to my youth very special. I was preparing for my graduation while Margaret and Kirsten were in my site.

To prepare for the graduation we made paper graduation caps, bought the one and half pound cake, made 4 galloons of juice, prepared small speeches for every student and practiced the tricky Spanish words I would have to say. This graduation consisted of approximately 18 youth from ages 14 to 24 who participated in my group of Escojo Mi Vida. To graduate they had to attend my 10 weeks of hourly talks and activities, present a small mock presentation on one of the Escojo topics and had to pass their final exam. The themes that they learned in this groups focused on HIV/AIDS tranmission prevention and prevention of teenage pregnancies, but also included talks on self-esteeme, sex work, family violence, making decisions, and more. The first few weeks of my talks I was so nervous to go up in front of these youth and try to speak in Spanish with vocabulary for the most part I was still not familiar with, but by the end of the course I feel like I could joke around and just relax around these kids. Now, they come up to me when I’m going around the community, give me a big hug and ask me ‘what’s up?’. Although I still have my moments of utter embarrassment and nervousness in front of them- for example during graduation I kept saying “tengo emocionada” instead of “estoy emocionada” which they found very funny and I didn’t figure out what I had said wrong until the end of the graduation- I now feel comfortable around these kids. My goal is to hope that they feel like they can confide in me. That I can be seen as a friend and a person who can help them if they have trouble in school, with friends, with boyfriends/girlfriends, or with their family. I also hope I have inspired them to go into their community and spread what they have learned in the course, to practice safe-sex themselves and support their friends in doing the same. I am very excited because a handful of my youth were very excited about starting their own group of Escojo Mi Vida. They will be going to the community over, hopefully in the near future giving talks on the same themes that I had given. These students are smart, enthusiastic, creative, and I know they will do a better job than I did, which I love. I’m so proud of all of them and can’t wait to see what they do with their lives ahead.

The next step in this process is we will go into the high school to give talks as well to the youth in the schools. This will all also be community youth-run. I hope that by facilitating these youth to continue this work, the program will be more and more sustainable.

Now with the Escojo Mi Vida graduation out of the way, I have an Hogares Saludables graduation to have. I hope with practice these graduations will get easier and easier and hopefully more and more plentiful.