Mean Girls

Don’t worry, this isn’t about the other volunteers. It’s actually about one of my absolute favorite projects I’ve gotten to work on so far here. I’ve been leading a weekly workshop for third and fifth-grade girls at the school in Concepción. Every week, we tackle a different topic relevant to women and girls in Costa Rica. The first week, we talked about stereotypes of women and how the girls are and want to be different than those stereotypes. The second week, we talked about healthy relationships and dating violence.

Explaining the rules

Having fun during the review game

This week we worked on bullying which, as many of you know, is a huge area of interest for me because I had such a horrible experience with being bullied in middle school. Today was by far my favorite day of the class. It was really fun and exciting to take lessons I’ve already done with students in the US and use them in Spanish. It was definitely experiment, and it turned out fantastically, in my humble opinion. We started with a review game to refresh our memories about the first two weeks, and I think they had a lot of fun racing back and forth to the white board. Then, we played the telephone/whisper down the lane game to introduce them to gossip and bullying. They also had a lot of fun with that game, and thankfully all of the phrases they used got ridiculously distorted along the way! Then we had a more serious moment of talking about how badly bullying can impact people’s lives and we even talked about the slew of “bullycides” (suicides caused by bullying) we’ve had in the US in recent years. Then we had them journal about times when they have been bullies, times when they have been bystanders, and times when they have been bullied. We had them write advice to people who are being bullied and talked about how important the role of the bystander is. We even had a few girls confide in us that they are being bullied and we were able to report it to the school.

Teaching some basic stretches during the women's workshop

Another cool project we’ve gotten to do: My Spanish class put on a workshop for women in our community about healthy living. I taught them basic exercises that they can do with little to no space and no equipment. We talked about all of the health problems caused by a sedentary lifestyle and I had the women write a schedule of their daily lives and when they can fit in exercise, even for just a few minutes at a time. Most of them said they were re-committing to exercising and being healthy. The best part—my friend Anna actually saw one of the women out exercising with her family after that, and she said she was sticking to her plan!

That's all for now! All is well here. Much love,

Rachel