The camp started at exactly 3:30pm, even though the board members were present as early as 2:30pm.The one hour delay was due to the late arrival of the concerned youths and also the participation of some in their inter-class competitions.
Present at the institution were the serious and dedicated members that have always been there since we began working with these schools: Brian, Dickson, Nenne, Wallace, Caroline and Ashu. Since we were to work with the same youths we did during the first session, there was no need for us to do any form of registration again. All we did was carry out a roll call of those present, and amongst the sixty seven(67) present last time, seventeen(17) were absent. We also recorded five(5) new youths, making the total number present to fifty five(55).Among those present, twenty nine(29) were boys and twenty six(26)girls and the average age was fifteen(15).
As per the proposal of the US coordinator and with the accord of the board members, we introduced a new topic on "Success" before moving to the warm ups. During this brief discussion which was headed by myself (Brian), Nenne and Ashu in three different groups, we began by trying to find from the youths their definition of success, who they considered successful and why? Many defined or understood success to be the accumulation wealth or living in affluence. They also sited the famous Cameroonian footballer, Samuel Eto'o and some other wealthy individuals in our society as examples of successful individuals. We then made them to understand that success is being the best person that you can be, that you must work hard in order to be considered successful and this usually starts with setting up genuine goals in their daily lives and striving to achieve them. We also made them to understand that as humans, we are all bound to make mistakes and the most important to them should be their ability to learn from these errors and strive to correct them in the future.
After this, we moved on to the warm ups, which comprised light jogging and stretching. From there we moved straight to the football drills, which was made up of the following: juggling of the ball, the red-light, green light dribbling exercise and lastly the inside drag. Here, their application was a little bit slow, even though a few number of them excelled in this exercise, especially the boys.
The session ended with the discussion on the topic "Healthy Relationships". Many of them understood the term relationship to be that of boy-girl or love relationship. We thus had the task to explain to them what a healthy relationship was all the about; it must not always be a love relationship. They understood that it can be the same sex relationship or opposite sex. We pointed out to them that what matters most to define a healthy relationship should be mutual respect and concern for each other as humans, the ability to respect another's wishes, and most importantly that sex is not a parameter to define a relationship. Here it should be noted that the youths actively participated in this discussions. They had so many questions and doubts and we did our best to clarify them. Also worth noting is that Nenne, Caroline, and Dickson took over the command at this stage, while the others assisted them. I will also like to note the active participation of the sports master of this institution. He aided in the drills so much, for he is a trained sports instructor with more than three years experience in the field. More to this, he told us that he finds our package very rich and resourceful to the youths.
We shall continue with activities at Kosala next Wednesday.
Cheers,
Aminkeng Brian
Project Manager of After School Sessions, Cameroon Football Development Program
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