Community concept

Favorite parts of Granada
Water bottles!


This morning we had another workshop day at camp, with the theme as "community." Workshop days basically mean that we choose a theme and use the commonality of soccer to raise awareness of the lessons that transfer to that theme. Last week we held workshop days on Leadership and Teamwork, and this week we will focus more on looking outside of ourselves and our immediate friends/family to think about Community and Sportsmanship. In our time in Granada, we've noticed that a lot of times people will take great care in how they present themselves and their own home. People are extremely well put together, no matter what clothes, and take a lot of pride in cleaning/straightening their homes, no matter how big or small. That pride, however, does not seem to transfer to the larger community. Neighborhoods and Granada as a whole are covered in trash, with public buildings and roads falling apart. Planting the seed that a lot of people doing their small part can make a big difference was our goal for today.

We began with a quick group warmup, where everyone had to move around in a large space until a number was called. When a number was called they had to make groups in those numbers. Anyone who was left out did our favorite punishment: star jumps! At the end we called out the number of the total group and everyone came together to talk a little bit about the idea of community. We discussed different communities they are a part of, which to be honest was like pulling teeth. Our suspicion that young people do not feel a part of the larger whole was confirmed. Over and over the girls would say "family" or "friends" but never mentioned school, church, Granada, barrios (neighborhoods), or anything else.

From there we broke into groups and had each group take a piece of a "puzzle" and draw their favorite part of Granada. Each group ended up drawing a different part, including some of our favorites, the Central Park and the Lake! We then divided the hill we've been using as a bench, which has slowly been collecting trash in addition all that was there already, into four quadrants, one per team. Holding up the pictures, the girls were told their quadrant represented the part of Granada that they had drawn, and their job was to clean it up as fast as they could. On the count of three, each team cleaned up their part of the hill in no time at all! In less than a minute the whole hill was spotless...they had even cleaned the leaves and sticks. Picking up the dividers, they could see the fruit of their labor and also realized that each group doing a small part made a big difference in virtually no time. We put the puzzle back together and handed out our new water bottles to help encourage the girls to reuse instead of leaving trash every day. After celebrating a cleaner Granada we played games to finish up the day.

Entonces... (so....) on to the afternoon!