By Bridget Horkan | Co Founder and Project Leader
Thamarai team has been in action honoring our commitment towards fostering full potential and well-being for the past two years despite many challenges. We have hosted daily over the phone student learning programs, village center support desk, food and education supplies distribution, health awareness, and immunity-boosting awareness-raising but now we have the great news that we can restart our after-school and learning center programs. Our village youth facilitators have been doing intensive training and we are ready to reopen our doors, within Covid safety guidelines, on Monday, Sept 13th especially serving children that society has most marginalized.
Many students have low levels of literacy and have health issues (eg) 77% of the 130 children who attend our programs are anemic and many come from homes with challenges. We will start back with homework support, language & digital literacy, and sports programs. We will also concentrate on increasing nutrition with healthy snacks and health education programs. One area close to our heart is to bring more equity and access to everyone and especially girls.
An interesting addition to our programming has been Frisbee for girls. Normally the village sports ground is full of happy boys, girls rarely step forward for sports and families do not generally encourage it. Gender equality is a value that many of our female youth facilitators stand for as they have grown up in environments where they have been encouraged to be at home carrying many of the domestic chores while their brothers have enjoyed more freedom. Frisbee is a great entry point for girl's sports as it is a no-contact, mixed-gender, self-refereed sport that’s played with a flying disc. It serves as a powerful tool for girls and boys, men and women of all age groups to play on an equal and non-judgmental footing. In Thamarai, in association with Playequity and a wonderful local international coach Selvi, who role models female empowerment, we are currently teaching 20 girls how to play and they will eventually teach the boys.
Youth facilitator Jagadeswari from Annai Nagar village says "It's very rare that the girl children are playing in the ground but when we started frisbee most of the girl children were interested in joining. While playing frisbee I can see the team spirit within the children and happiness.They are learning how to throw, catch the frisbee disk and they are learning new words while they are playing and they are eager to learn more about frisbee. I'm very happy to see the girl children are playing on the sports ground now".
Watching the girls play, I see the future unfolding of dynamic, empowered young women leading change.
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
