Archive for the Volunteer blogs Category

Abrobiano Cycle 7 - Week 10

Week 10 started with the busiest weekend of the cycle - we really saw Ghana! We had the Adaklu volunteers over for the night, and had a relaxing catch up of food, walks, coconuts, swimming and bonfires. I’m sure the visitors went away feeling very glad of their condition up in the North compared to our relatively basic lifestyle.

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On the Sunday the Abrobiano gang travelled along with the Adaklu crew to Kakum National Park. We’d all heard lot about the canopy walk and the beauty of the place, so expectations were high! We were taken on a walking tour first by our esteemed guide Christopher. He excited us with talk of monkeys and leopards, only to break the news that we would not see such nocturnal beasts. But it was a really beautiful rainforest, and we had soon climbed the hill to the start of the canopy walk. The route was a series of 7 precarious rope walkways, ranging from 11m-40m high in the canopy. Some volunteers loved it and were shaking themselves every which way, and others edged lowly, clinging to the rope for their dear lives.

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We all survived, luckily, and boarded the buses bound to Cape Coast. We were hosted and treated to a grand jollof feast by the Football For Hope guys, and some took the chance to explore the city and the buzzing market streets. One huge, manic road led all the way down the sea, and down it you could buy almost whatever your heart contented: fine cloth; delicious street food; stylish sandals; paint of the emulsion or oil based variety; smooth Swiss chocolate; even tiny wooden elephants. The vibrancy of the city swept some of the village-dwellers up, and we spent all of our allowance all at once! A couple of the group also ventured up Fort William, one of many ancient colonial monuments. Though the mist had wrapped the city up, the view of the multicoloured buildings steepled upon the cliffs was reminiscent of Naples- a lovely view! In the early evening we had a game of football - an essential feature of the team meet-ups - on the artificial turf that was typically high tempo and exhausting for all! The evening brought some real Ghanaian culture - live music! Rastas with gnarly beats and bass riffs got us all bouncing, and they even managed to fit in the Abro anthem which is Hero by Enrique. We danced until the early hours, and trudged home to get a quick kip.

Monday morning saw the departure of Adaklu, but the fun didn’t stop for the others! We hit the market again, and devoured some plantain and beans before finally hitting the road after noon. We had one final destination before Abro - Elmina Castle. This is a castle 503 years old established by the Portuguese before passing to the Dutch and finally the English. It had always functioned as a part of the ‘evil trade’ - slavery, and was a network of dungeons and cells contrasting with the churches and governor’s quarters up above. Particularly chilling was the ‘door of no return’, the final leg of the slaves stay in the fort which led directly to the beach. One inscription we found on the wall resonated with a lot of the volunteers: Until the lion has a historian, the hunter is always the hero.

On Tuesday, the group had to rouse itself back into action, to try and finish the work left to do in Abrobiano. We had deadlines for football nets, painting projects, an impact movie to finish, and final surveys to get done - busy!

On Wednesday Bernadine and Robbie showed us what they know. Robbie’s topic was radio, and showed us the basic layout of a recording studio with all the knobs and soundwaves. Bernadine provided what all they UKVs were needing - recipes for our favourite Ghanaian dishes! There was yam balls, sobolo and kelewele, so now whenever we miss Ghana, we can whip up a meal and remember all the good times! In the evening Deladem hosted the final social with some quizzes and fifa.

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By Thursday things were looking good. The KG classroom was taking shape brilliantly, and I don’t think anyone expected the vibes to change so much with just a few licks of paint! We have numbers, letters, verbs, flags and even shapes! Sakodie treated us to the final KWIK which was a nice board game, ludo.

Come Friday, everything was getting wrapped up - final filming was being done by the media team, action research were compiling their pie charts and the infrastructure putting the final flurries on the painting.

The final weekend in Abrobiano looms large!

Cycle Two - Second week in Adaklu District 5th - 12th October

After spending our first week in Ghana meeting our fellow volunteers, integrating into our communities and settling into our host homes, project Adaklu is really beginning to pick up pace. We have conducted our main market research, begun our teaching side project, and started holding meetings with previously formed trading groups.

At the beginning of the week the team, including our team leaders and in country coordinator, went to visit our biggest local market at Mafi. Beforehand, we all took a trip to the schools in our community. As it was World Teachers Day, we decided to acknowledge, appreciate and celebrate all of the hard work that teachers put into developing the youth of today.

The team celebrating national teacher’s day

Shortly after arriving at Mafi market we split into teams of Groundnut, Kente and Maize and began our market research. Our aim was to gather information from stall holders about the price of their products, how much they sell, and how they present the goods which they have to offer. We even had the chance to do a bit of shopping at the market and sample some of the food they had to offer, like oranges (which are green in Ghana, not orange), groundnuts and sugar cane. On the whole, the research trip was very successful, giving us lots of information, providing us with a basis to support the groups which we are working with to develop their sales and eventually get to market.

Our research trip to Mafi market

On Tuesday some of the ICS team began teaching in the local primary and junior high schools. We each have three 1 hour scheduled time slots in which we teach every week. We all felt quite nervous before we started teaching, but quickly realised that there was no need. The teachers are friendly, and the children are eager to learn. After another successful afternoon the team congregated at the team meeting area to discuss what we discovered at the market and our thoughts on teaching.

Our teaching continued on Wednesday. The team of 16 are split between different schools, meaning that we all teach at different times on different days. Wednesday however is the only day which the whole team teaches at some point during the day. In the evening, the team attended our team leaders social event. Socials are a really good opportunity to have a laugh as a group, our first social entailed lots of child like party games, like pin the tail on the pig- We definitely underestimated how difficult it would be!

A fellow volunteer teaching at Waya Primary School

Thursday we held our first meetings with the pre existing trading groups of Waya and Anfoe. This meeting, along with our market research helped us to identify the needs of the groups and work to support continual and sustainable development in our local communities.

Teaching local maize farmers on record keeping

Later in the afternoon we traveled into Waya to meet with the chief Torgbui Lablulu and the queen mother Mama Dzakuia. The Chief and Queen Mother informed us of what they believed the challenges in the community were, highlighting poor time keeping in Waya. We discussed up and coming events in the local area, such as our awareness raising event on 18th October. The chief invited the team to the opening to the Education Trust Fund at the end of the month, this will be a great way to continue integrating into the community and keep updated about the progressions which the community is making. Thursday afternoon we lost power, the second power cut since arriving here. Being so close to the equator, It gets dark quite early and It’s a lot harder to navigate your way around in the dark than first anticipated. The power cut lasted over 36 hours. Friday evening saw the arrival of hundreds of families and friends arrive into our host community to begin celebrating the live of the recently deceased (still with no electricity). Before arriving in Adaklu, 4 individuals from our local communities passed, today the three-day-celebrations began. In Ghana, funerals are a world apart from what they’re like in England: polar opposite. Funerals in Ghana are seen to be a celebration of the individuals life, Friday evening family and friends begin traveling to the community of the burial, before the body of the deceased is transported to their home for one last night. Friday night consists of a huge party, singing, dancing, music and prayers, starting from around 8pm and continuing until the end of the funeral celebrations, even through the night into the next day. The celebrations continue through until Sunday when the church service and burial commences.

At the weekends our schedule opens up quite a lot and gives us free time to catch up with our washing etc. and relax before engaging in another busy week. Open Mic Night is the only scheduled event on Saturdays, a chance to spend time together and have fun, anyone can come up to the stage and perform, whether that be singing, dancing, telling jokes or any other form of entertainment which you can imagine. Amy was the only one brave enough to sing solo in front of our fellow volunteers. She was the first on stage, singing a solo version of Rihanna. Followed by groups singing various songs, dancing around, and telling jokes.
Sunday is our host home and counterpart day. After visiting the seamstress and meeting with the farming groups, everyone in our host home sat down and ate outside together.

Everything has been amazing so far, I can only hope it carries on the way it’s started.

Thanks for reading! There will be another update next week from our fellow volunteers.

Chloe and Amy

Cycle One: Sixth Week in Adaklu District - 17th - 23rd August

Monday started off with a much needed breakfast buffet before getting stuck into our mid placement review (MPR) sessions which took place at a hotel in Ho. This included each group - Media, Planning and Logistics, Safety and Security, and Monitoring and Evaluation - presenting on what work they’ve been doing for the past five weeks. It included their achievements, challenges (and how they were overcome) as well as plans for the rest of the project. This involved a grand reveal of media’s MPR video which highlighted the group’s accomplishments to date. We were also given time for self-reflection when we were each asked to discuss what we’ve learnt so far and how we’re getting on with our personal development goals. From confidence building to new skills in video editing it quickly became clear that most people were jumping leaps and bounds towards achieving their goals. When formal sessions ended in the afternoon there was time for some much needed rest and relaxation.

Tuesday we continued with our MPR sessions which included a slightly soppy but much enjoyed ‘love hearts sessions’ whereby everyone wrote their name on a piece of paper which was then passed around the group and everybody anonymously wrote a positive comment about the person. We all then enjoyed reading our own - some got more emotional than others! After finishing up the sessions and accidently enjoying slightly more time in the hotel due to minor technical difficulty with our beloved bus, we headed home to Anfoe.

Wednesday morning started with a team meeting where we established an organised timetable for the remaining weeks, including dates for our sexual heath youth seminar and our next awareness event on the importance of savings. We then had our Active Citizen Day presentation on sanitation which included an Oscar-worthy drama from three of our volunteers. In the evening, we were treated to a social which included volunteer ‘speed-dating’! One of the questions was ‘what would you do for the day if there were no laws or consequences’ and some interesting responses surfaced, including becoming Michelle Obama for the day! The intense game of musical chairs (or rather musical chair breaking as people got competitive) was a personal highlight. The night then ended with cups of milo (Ghana’s version of hot chocolate) all round.

On Thursday we had a meeting about an exciting new summer school project we will run alongside our main project. The summer school will run on Mondays teaching English and IT/Science and Thursday’s teaching Maths and Creative Art for two hours at a time for both lower and upper primary. We also had our ‘My Culture Day’ on the south of England, where we learnt rather surprisingly that the name ‘Big Ben’ actually refers to the bell within the tower not the clock. Our Monitoring and Evaluation team had a meeting with our project partners, the District Assembly in Waya to ask them the details about what will happen with our agricultural groups after registration. Friday was a big day for our agricultural groups because they registered with the District Assembly; this is a big achievement and fulfils one of the project aims.

In the afternoon we had our ‘know what I know’, also called ‘Nyanukemenya’, session on horoscopes where we split the group into their star signs and read out their personal horoscopes for the week (refer to next week’s blog to see if it worked!). We later had a meeting about a painting project one of the volunteers has set up. We worked out some ideas and assigned people to different parts, like the solar system, the alphabet and numbers. We’re hoping to begin painting soon once we’ve got some more supplies. In the early evening some of the girls began training for our rematch against the Waya women’s football group, no doubt we’ll beat them again!

Over the weekend the groundnut group had a meeting in which we set up the date to have our first training session. The session will be on record keeping: Kente group have already completed their record training and maize group are also ready with their schedule. On the whole it was busy but very enjoyable week!

Cycle One: Fifth week in Adaklu District – 10th-17th August

After our first awareness raising event on Sunday 9^th August the Project Coordinator gave the team the morning off as many of the team members were exhausted after the day’s event. In the afternoon, however, work on the project had to continue, so the volunteers met with their local farming groups for business as usual! Also, the Maize group went to meet a newly formed group of Maize farmers who had shown interest in working together at our awareness event on the importance of group formation. In the evening we had an Active Citizen Day presentation which three of our fellow volunteers hosted for the group; they focused on humanitarian aid, and in their presentation they had the team partake in a case study where we were split into three groups. One group took the role of the UN, and the other two groups had to devise a plea on behalf of Haiti and Syria, for the necessary resources.

Throughout the week the entire team was busy preparing for the project’s Mid-Placement Review at the beginning of the following week. Photos, videos, and music were put together to summarize the past four weeks of fun but also hard work. We didn’t waste more time on resting, however, and it was on Tuesday – just a day after our first awareness event – that we started planning and preparing for our upcoming sexual health seminar for the youth and women of Waya, in order to prevent the spread of STD’s and to help raise awareness of the facilities the local clinic has, and also to help reduce teenage pregnancies. We plan to run this session in our spare time, as an extra project outside of our main aims (improving the livelihood conditions of the people of Waya). During the afternoon, we experienced a huge rain storm where the UK volunteers had a lot of fun running around in the rain, whilst the ICV’s looked on confused… Later in the evening we had our weekly social – this time it was a picnic where everyone got to try each other’s host parents cooking. There were also counterpart related games, to help improve the relationship between counterparts, and also have a bit of fun at the same time.

Later in the week, getting ready for the Mid-Placement Review was progressing at full speed with all of us working on both our team and individual presentations. As research for the sexual health seminar, one group had to go to Waya in the morning to find out what sort of facilities the clinic has in terms of family planning – unfortunately, our main means of transportation was broken, so the volunteers walked the distance. The possible highlight of the week was a bite of Bulgarian feta cheese for every volunteer during this week’s My Culture Day presentation, greeted with a mixed response from UK and ICVs!

It was on Friday when a group of the volunteers went back to Waya to meet up with a number of local maize farmers who were keen to create and register another group in the community. After a detailed introduction to Lattitude ICS’s project in Adaklu Waya as well as agreeing on working towards the same objectives, both the volunteers and the farmers seemed filled in with a lot of positivity towards all the hard work that was waiting for them. We counted the day as a huge success as it expanded our project with one more group of farmers to add to our family, but also created even more local friends for the current and future volunteers. Taking this into account, it only made sense for us to close the day with a Nyanukemenya (or ‘Know What I Know’) session on choir singing. It was incredibly inspiring and unbelievably touching to see all volunteers on the project – a number of about 28 of us here – pouring their souls out in singing ‘Lean on Me’ by Bill Withers, even if not completely in tune…

The weekend was highlighted by, of course, more preparations for the upcoming week but also by our Open Mic session where everyone was involved singing and dancing. One of the volunteers was also celebrating her birthday, so we tried to make the evening extra special for her, with her counterpart among others performing a dance for her blending into the happy birthday tune sung in two different languages simultaneously – the magic of cross-cultural interaction. We left Anfoe on Sunday and arrived in Ho just around 40 minutes later. The rest of the evening was left for us to enjoy each other’s company in the pool of the hotel we were staying in with Adaklu Mountain and entire Ho city at the background. Everyone made sure to enjoy the view, the pool, the food, and the free time we had, knowing that the real work was just about to begin.

Cycle One: Fourth week in Adaklu District - 3rd-9th August

Family Fun Day

Hello! Calling in from Ghana.

This week, Lattitude ICS held our first awareness raising event in the community focusing on the importance of group formation. This event was a Family Fun Day! We have all been extremely busy throughout the entire week with numerous emergency meetings and last minute decisions. The Planning and Logistics team did an excellent job organising and preparing for this day and it turned out to be a hit. All the groups contributed a lot throughout the weekdays leading up to the event on Sunday to prepare for it. The Media team have had their creative hats on by designing posters to advertise the event and to use at the event. They’ve visited all of the local churches to make an announcement and also made announcements over the loud speakers in the village. The Safety and Security team have been busy running risk assessments for the different activities for the day. As stressful as it sounds, it was also lots of fun, and honestly – it was all worthwhile. Finally, the Monitoring and Evaluation team are now ready to evaluate how the day turned out – although we are all pretty positive it was a definite success!

So basically, the Family Fun Day consisted of a dance competition for the children, the sack race, lime and spoon and an apple bobbing stall (apple bobbing went down a hit with the Ghanaians who had never heard of it before). We also played two football matches, one for the women and one for the men. It was our ICS team against the local town of Waya. We are proud to say that the women won our game with 3-2 in penalties! Everybody played really well, the team support and motivation was amazing – a real team bonding day for us.

The main reason for the event was not for the activities and football games though. There was actually an important purpose for the event and that was to raise awareness of the importance of ‘Group Formation’. Our aim of the project is to develop the different groups of workers within the community to create group businesses rather than individual workers. At our event we had different stalls for the working/farming groups so that the people could meet each other and sign up for a group of their work. We also had stalls for business management, importance of group formation and the benefits of registering their business. GN bank also turned up to create bank accounts for the different business groups. Each of our teams designed flyers to hand out at these stalls. The flyers consisted of lots of information on each area which will hopefully provide knowledge and understanding on the topics in order to become a good business.

The day on a whole was very successful and it seemed as though everybody had fun. The turnout was huge, ranging from children to the elders and also the Queen Mother. The activities were fun and we think rematches in the football are in order which would be fun to compete again. The Planning team pulled it out the bag and produced an amazing day – roll on the next event! g

Cycle One: Third week in Adaklu District – 27th July–2nd August

This week has been a hectic one, as we analyse and conclude the results of our community survey from the weekend and we begin to plan our very first Awareness Day. Monday begins with a trip to Mafi and Ho to see how their markets operate in comparison with the local market in Waya that we visited. Everyone is really excited to see another part of Ghana, and despite an early morning, spirits are high. That is until, shock horror, the bus blows a tyre on the dusty roads just outside of Waya. The wait to get it fixed, means an excuse for a few selfies as a team and then we are back on the road.

We arrive at a VERY busy Mafi market, a vast contrast to Waya, with stalls, cars and people everywhere, selling everything from groundnuts to maize to jewellery to pastries. Lots of volunteers get very excited by all the fruit on offer and stock up – we like to make sure we get our 5 a day! But our objectives always come first and before buying ourselves anything, we spend our time observing and interacting with the traders, finding out how easy it is to obtain a stall, the prices they sell at and how good business is. We find out a lot of interesting information and it will be good to use in our future training surrounding marketing and branding.

Afterwards we head to Ho, where we spend some more time with the traders – there are more clothes stalls available in Ho and a lot of our team pick up authentic clothing, getting away from the dark colours most of the UK volunteers are used to. With our heads full of new knowledge from the markets and stomachs full of the delights the market had to offer, we head back to Anfoe for dinner and our first volunteer-led Active Citizen Day presentation.

The group have chosen Nuclear Weapons as a topic and they deliver information on the ‘for’ and ‘against’ side for nuclear disarmament before getting the whole group to join the debate. The group is very split on the topic and it makes for a good discussion, with everyone giving their opinion and making interesting arguments from the cost of having the weapons to the potential problems countries may face if they are unarmed. I believe we could have a few activists in our group!

Tuesday starts with the exciting news that the pig some of our volunteers purchased has arrived! Although, the plan to call the pig Herbert, is ruined with the news the pig is actually a girl! We’ve had lots of other suggestions from Babe to Jolene to just keeping Herbert; finally we decide on Roxie, who seems very happy in her specially built pig pen and all the food the volunteers are bringing her. Once the excitement dies down, it’s time for work and all of the groups meet at the Blue House to set their agendas for the week. The monitoring and evaluation team are analysing the results of the survey, safety and security are filling in risk assessments, planning and logistics are coming up with ideas for our first Awareness Event and the media team are posting last week’s blog and coming up with the new idea of ‘a day in the life of’ where they will film the farmers to demonstrate what their daily life is like. We end the day with an all Team Meeting, where star counterparts of the week are awarded and everyone updates on their work.

Our first Awareness Day is the topic of Wednesday, with the planning team explaining their idea to the team for feedback and any other ideas. They’ve come up with a Family Fun Day, complete with fun activities for the children, such as a sack race and apple bobbing, and a football match, but with the main focus being on group formation and registration, including stalls on record keeping, creating a bank account and the benefits of registration. We are hoping to also have the District Assembly and the Bank present to talk to the community. It sounds like a fun day for all involved and we hope it will be a big success.

Wednesday night is social night and it’s four of our volunteers turn to host us – they start the night with a fun game where everyone must pick a dare from the hat – meaning we have some brilliant impressions of pigs, descriptions of volunteer’s perfect partners and some singing! Then it’s film time and we are given orange slices and toffees as snacks – it’s better than an actual cinema!

Our Thursday is a very busy one, with back to back meetings and events happening. We start with an all team meeting to organise what needs to happen around the Awareness Day within each individual teams and come up with questions to ask when we have our bank meeting in the afternoon. Luckily our day is broken up with the local children performing traditional displays of dancing and music, portraying their Voltarian culture. It’s all really exciting and colourful and some of our volunteers are pulled up to dance with the children – much to their embarrassment!

From there, it was back to work, to have a meeting with GN Bank, who gave us lots of information about creating group bank accounts and who very kindly agreed to help us at our Awareness Day next Sunday. The man from the bank was so passionate about his work, we think he managed to convince some of us to create accounts with them! Afterwards, our planning team headed to Waya to visit the football pitch and speak to the Chief and Elders for their approval of our event. Thankfully, they agreed and the space at the pitch will really work to show off everything we want to do.

Our night ended with ‘my culture day’ where four of our volunteers taught us about their culture in the Volta region of Ghana, including details about traditional dress, dancing and festivals. We all learnt a lot and are hoping we will get to experience one of the festivals during our time here.

We started Friday with a general meeting to write up our experiences at the Mafi and Ho markets and what we learnt from the bank. The media and planning team meet to discuss how to promote our Awareness Event and are getting ready to create lots of colourful posters and flyers to catch the community’s attention. We will also be doing announcements in the local church services on Sunday and continue to do announcements on the big speakers across Waya.

Lots of our groups met with their individual farmer groups during the day too, and every group has managed to elect an executive team and are starting on constitutions – it’s all going really well and we’re very proud of the progress everyone is making.

Friday night is our ‘Know What I Know’ night and two of our volunteers, who turn out to be counterparts who’ve read the same book, teach us about how to be an effective person and move from a state of dependency to independence to interdependency. It’s really interesting and everyone is impressed – putting a lot of pressure on next week’s group!

Although it’s a Saturday and technically the weekend, there is no rest for the wicked as our teams meet early morning to prepare for next week and finish the results from the survey, which is looking really interesting and will give us lots to work on. We then spend the afternoon making football nets from water sachets, a little project we’ve created on the side as most of the goal posts in the community don’t include nets. It’s recycling at its finest! Once the sun had gone down, half of our team went to play football to prepare for next Sunday’s Awareness Day match against Waya football team. Our proud team leader managed to score a goal but the celebrations didn’t last for long, as she scored an own goal shortly after! Oh well, you win some, you lose some! She’s insisting that technically, she scored two goals and therefore, should be even more proud of herself. The other half of our team did a short exercise class of cardio, yoga and stretching, which causes some sore muscles the next day.

The evening was open mic and we all came together to tell jokes, riddles and finish with a boys vs girls sing off – to which we still don’t know the winner of, with the boys insisting they were better and the girls determined they had nailed it. Either way, Roxie the pig, who was present, seemed to enjoy it all.

Sunday morning we all headed to the churches across Anfoe and Waya to spread the news of our Awareness Day and invite all of the community along. We also stayed for the full services and fully enjoyed the singing and sermons. Once back home, it was counterpart day and most spent their time washing and catching up on odd jobs before spending the night relaxing before it starts all over again in the morning! We know it’s going to be a busy one preparing for our first Awareness Event and making sure everyone has lots of family fun (while forming and registering groups, of course)!

Volunteer Profile: Cycle 3 - Joy Sampson

Name: Joy Sampson

Age: 18

What were you doing before ICS: I am currently on my gap year between Alevels and university, so before ICS I was working at the Harry Potter studios teaching people how to ride broomsticks. Alongside this I helped in my local primary school with the reception class assisting to colour in princesses and build with Lego.

3 facts about you: I had the opportunity to fly a Tutor aircraft during aerobatics. I competed in National Athletic finals twice with schools. I finished the Tough Guy Assault course in Wolverhampton, one of the world’s most demanding survival ordeals which involved walking through fire, crawling in potholes and swamps- all after a cross country run.

Which ICS Groups are you in?: I’m in Sports and Monitoring and evaluation

Favourite Experience on ICS so far: My favourite experience of the project so far has got to be the night we spent performing at Candos where we all thrived off each other’s positive energy. It was lovely to support each other and witness the hard work paying off as we presented a meaningful message to the community. As well as this, driving through the safari at Kwantu was beautiful and eye opening to the see animals in their natural habitat- especially the elephants and giraffes.

What have you been doing this week?: This week the sports team hosted a soccer tournament at the local primary school where we had an array of activities for children such as facepainting, dance performances, music and a lot more. It was a successful day which ended with the ICS girls playing the local girls team! Aside from that, we performed at Candos Arts centre where some of us acted, others sang and I performed a poem addressing the issues surrounding alcohol and substance abuse. It was an exciting evening and the showcase of arts really brought to light how much talent the group holds.

Volunteer Profile: Cycle 3 - Robert Mohale (TL)

Name: Robert Mohale

Age: 27

What Were You Doing Before ICS?: Before I applied for ICS, i was just sited at home waiting for my BAHonoursin Psychology results. Then I saw an advert on internet for volunteering post for latitude ICS. Then I applied and called for interview wherein I became successful.

3 Facts About You?: I love working with young people, empathetic and treat people with the same respect. I have honours degrees in Youth development and Psychology.

Which ICS Groups Are You In?: I am the team leader for Latittude ICS (Human Dignity Center).
Favorite Experience on ICS So Far?: My favorite experience in the placement is when the Latittude ICS (HDC)co-host the night with Candoz art center wherein all the group members have participated on various acts such as poetry, drama, and singing.

What Have You Been Doing This Week?: This week I have been having meetings with all the groups, checking all their plans and ensuring that they finalize everything that they have planned in these two weeks left.

Volunteer Profile: Cycle 3 - Mandilakhe Yaka

Name: Mandilakhe Yaka

Age: 24

What were you doing before ICS?:I was managing a group called Shizzo Manizzo in Grahamstown(Vukani Location), where we express ourselves through Art(Hip Hop, Poerty, Soul/Gospel and being Dj’s). As I am a Poet so I was performing almost every Saturday near the Town Hall and also having events so that the voices of the youth could heard.

3 facts about you: I like working with the youth to take them away from the wrong paths and let them use their God given talents, To toil is what I like most and get the job done.,I am a Poet and a DJ.

Which ICS Groups are you in?: I’m in the Culture and Video groups

Favourite Experience on ICS So Far: When we successfuly held the Candoz event.

What Have You Been Doing This Week?: This week we’ve been busy organising the event for the Pre-Candoz and also trying to book an apointment with the Department of Arts&Culture as the Culture group.

Volunteer Profile: Cycle 3 - Bukiwe Nako

Name: Bukiwe Nako

Age: 22

What Were You Doing Before ICS: Studying

3 Facts About You: I am hardworker work well with small groups,I commit in any work am given and i am very good listener.

Which ICS groups Are You In?: Sports and Social Media

Favourite Experience on ICS So Far: Having the dance off with Joy.

What Have You Been Doing This Week?: Monday i had a class in grade R at human dignity centre.
Tuesday,wensday and thursday went to teach in walmer high school about
sexual health.

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