On two days prior to our Action at Home program, I met with other fellow in-country team leaders, Nikita Giri and Akhilesh Thakur to discuss on how to carry it out. We had completed our ICS placement through Raleigh International Nepal. Akhilesh and I were placed at Gorkha while Nikita completed her placement in Makwanpur. It started from April 2018 and ended on July, 2018. We fixed that day that we would be doing our action as awareness session on UN SDGs for secondary-level pupils of Ratna Rajya Ma Vi School, Mid-Baneswor, Kathmandu on Tuesday 27th November 2018.
Our awareness program primarily focused on
· Education
· Health
· Livelihoods
· Sexual and Reproductive Health
· Strengthening Civil Society
· Environment
In addition to raising awareness about sustainable development goals among students to change behaviors of the participating students regarding their attitude towards the mother earth and the society they live in as well as to motivate them to take actions as a small contribution from them as a human and responsible global citizen, our aims were also to promote student engagements on the sustainable development goals through interactive games, like letting them choose the three priority goals for our country in order that needs to be addressed first to make development of our country sustainable. We also aimed to instill the sense of leadership among today’s youths to face the challenges that our world is currently facing from unsustainable path of development.
In our social action whatever we had planned, it went in the same way. We included 50 students in our awareness program. We had planned to explain briefly about each SDGs, asked them questions to confirm whether they understood or not, divided the students into groups, gave each group one SD goal, asked them to discuss in group and come up with the ideas as to how they as individual responsible citizen can help to achieve it and asked one of the students to present from each group about the take-away lesson from the class. We encouraged them to start from small actions towards achieving the goals of sustainable development, like making a habit to meet at least any one of the SDGs by throwing the chocolate wrappers in the dustbins instead of throwing it on the floor would help to achieve the goal of responsible consumption (by not polluting the environment after consuming the goods) and the goal of protecting life on land (by avoiding the plastic wrapper being eaten by stray cows and dogs or by not letting it mix in soil which would inhibit the growth of trees and other plants) . We hope that from the session we gave, it will have profound positive impact on them about doing a small action to make a better world, as we would like to say, “Act locally, Think globally”. Since the program had to be planned as per convenience of school administration and not ours, scheduled date could change against our wish and media persons could not be so flexible on date , plan for media coverage was dropped.
The program was successful which was evident from the response of the students to the questions we asked to measure whether they understood the SDGs individually. One of the student told us after the session, “Though it is included in our course book, we had not understood, but after this session, we got chance to understand why UN SDGs are so important for every one of us”.
In regards to future plans for volunteering, we believe that volunteering is an excellent way to spend our time when we have leisure time, are taking career-breaks or want to feel better by giving to the disadvantaged fellow human beings of this world in a way that is productive to the volunteer and the members of host community. So, like anyone else, we all have career choices that we strive to do better in and while we cannot say no to career development, we definitely say yes to volunteering when we have spare time, going through career-breaks or simply want to contribute to the disadvantaged people of the earth.
Young people are sometimes accused of not contributing to society but from our ICS experience, we got chance to experience something different. In our host communities, there were mostly few older people who would make decisions on the behalf of whole community and their decisions would have wide-ranging and long terms impacts – whether positive or negative, on all other people of the community who would have no say in the decision-making process. However, during our short stay in those communities, that tradition proved to be wrong. For example, in NC1 (Shikharjung), Dalit youths and children took the youth leadership training and solid waste management, from which they were motivated to manage the longstanding problem of litters everywhere in the community. To guide their motivation to action, NC1 volunteers organized litter-picking event for the first time in the village which would become regular weekly event by the Shikharjung Child and Youth Club in days that would follow. Raleigh ICS volunteers simply played the role of facilitator which would solve the pressing problem that had continued to remain unabated until then. Those older people would later appreciate the role that these young community members along with the Raleigh ICS volunteers played in solving the problem in the community that had troubled the community for so long.
Finally...
“Though it is included in our course book we had not understood, after this session we got chance to understand why UN SDGs are so important for every one of us” - One of the attendee student
