4 trips to the school, 60 handwritten invitations, 2 trips to church....Rookie attempts at development work

One of our successes so far has been finally getting a youth group together. As part of our training, Peace Corps has tasked us with putting together a youth group to practice our English teaching skills, organizing skills and of course, augment what students are learning in the classroom with communicative activities. The word "finally" is not really warranted at all, given that it took less than 2 weeks, but Peace Corps has us on a pretty tight timeline for training activities, so we were starting to get worried.

Things take a long time to do here. Organizing a meeting is a more drawn out and personalized process than it is in the states. If you wanted to start a club in the US in a high school or university, you would put a few signs, and the people who were interested would show up to the appointed place at the appointed hour. Not quite so here. I'm actually glad we had difficulties putting the group together, because it really gave us a hands-on look at how community organizing can be done effectively in this cultural context.

For various reasons, we weren't able to go around to all the classrooms at the school to invite students to join our group that way. So we tried a different tactic- making 60 invitations by hand (Que fachento!) and going around to all the different houses where there were youths live to deliver them. We teamed up with a teenager who had been in a previous group organized by volunteers, to figure out where houses with teenagers might be.

Sadly, this approach didn't really yield fruit. In our first meeting, after about an hour of waiting, only one student had shown up, and we hadn't even given him an invitation, but had personally invited him to the group when he asked us a question about English in the cyber cafe. After our first meeting flopped, he suggested that we come by his church's youth group meeting to invite people.

We ended up at an evangelical youth service for an hour of worship before making our announcement, but I think it made a big difference in the end.  This whole episode really showed me the importance of spending time with others on their own territory before trying to get them to do something, even if it's something they are interested in, or that you think they would find beneficial. Making a gesture first is essential. Secondly, organizing is more effective when its done using existing local institutions, which in small town Nicaragua, is very much based around church groups. Lastly, a personal/verbal invitation is most likely to bring in participants.

At this point, we have 6 students in the group and hopefully, we will grow it with word of mouth!