#LeadersOfAruba #2

In the second instalment of our #LeadersOfAruba series, we want to introduce you to Mirtha who has been our superb tour guide and a great support during our stay in Aruba.

Mirtha is a leader with the Dakota unit and has been a joyful presence at all of our trainings so far in Aruba ensuring we have plenty of water and/or ice tea to drink. She's also been making sure we get to discover the island, its culture and heritage: on Sunday, after our sessions with the leaders, she took us on a tour which included both the most northern AND most southern points of the island, and last night accompanied us to the Carubbian Festival in San Nicolas. Mirtha's supporting us again this weekend at camp and we're grateful for her loan of camping equipment as we only packed sleeping bag liners in our luggage.

The APG is looking to recruit even more leaders, and we'll be running two sessions next week for new volunteers. Check out our Facebook page or comment here for more info.

Rest Days in Paradise: Our Discovery of Baby (Flamingo) Beach

After 6 project days and training sessions involving leaders, Padvindsters, board members and other community organisations, it was time for a well earned rest. Before our departure, a lot of us had been tagged in a viral video of Flamingo Beach, Aruba, that did its rounds on Facebook - therefore, this was the prime opportunity to see it for ourselves. We made a video to share this once in a lifetime experience with all our friends and family. Check out our video from Baby (Flamingo) Beach...


With a day on the beach, it was also a chance to make some headway on team member challenges. Laura read a chapter of her book, Amy liberally applied sun cream to avoid getting burnt, Rachel added to her animal selfies collection, Helen practised her handstand and we all joined Bridget with a spot of beach yoga. Here's some photographic evidence:

Now we are preparing for our camp this weekend with the Padvindsters and Pioneers. We'll have another update on how it all went on Monday. 

The Conversation Continues

Tuesday and Wednesday this week saw us run two sessions for other community organisations: The Women's Club of Aruba and the Organisation of Public Pensioner's of Aruba (OPPA). We found out a little bit more about each of these other organisations and began a conversation about how they and the APG could work together in the future.

  

The Women's Club of Aruba is a charitable organisation who work on a wide variety of projects include 'Dress a Child' which takes place at Christmas time and taking action to address domestic violence. They're similar to the Soroptimists, Rotary and Lions organisations in the UK (who supported us with our fundraising efforts for our travel to Aruba). In the session we talked about some of the projects that the APG and the Women's Club have done together in the past such as 'Plant a Tree' and discussed ways that the two organisations could work together in the future: supporting each other with fundraising, volunteer recruitment, and developing the skills and career aspirations of girls and young women.

The OPPA are a group of retired professionals who gather for social activities and entertainments. One of the representatives from OPPA is also a member of the Tai Chi Association, and in our a discussion we talked about the possibilities of Padvindsters attending the Tai Chi centre, as well as how the APG could work together with OPPA on intergenerational activities.

Both sessions allowed us to showcase what guiding is about locally and internationally and allowed us to demonstrate some of the games and activities we use with our units in the UK. There was much laughing during our games of Zip Zap Boing and our rendition of Alice the Camel, and a beautiful moment when we closed the meetings with songs from each of our organisations (including 'Jazzy taps').

We hope others left as inspired as we did and these conversations continue so that the local communities can benefit from these collaborative projects!

Team GOLD Songbook

In each of our sessions we’ve been sharing some games and songs with leaders and girls. They can be hard to remember so here we’ve made a little songbook of the ones we’ve shared so far and some others we’ll be bringing to camp this weekend.

Alice the Camel

See a video here for actions. 

“Alice the camel has 10 humps, Alice the camel has 10 humps, Alice the camel has 10 humps, so go Alice go, boom boom boom.

Alice the camel has 9 humps etc…

Alice the camel has no humps, Alice the camel has no humps, Alice the camel has no humps, so Alice is a horse.”

Ride My Pony

Sing the first line as someone gallops around the inside of the circle and they stop at the end of the song line.

“Ride, Ride, Ride My Pony, Ride, Ride, Ride My Pony, Ride, Ride, Ride My Pony, This is how I ride it.”

The person in the middle shimmies with the person in the circle they are now standing in front of, first to the front, then the side, then the back.

“To the front, to the front, to the front, my pony, To the side, to the side, to the side, my pony, To the back, to the back, to the back my pony, this is how I ride it.”

The person who joined the shimmying now joins the other and gallops around the circle and also selects a new person with each verse.

REPEAT

Get Loose

This is a repeat after me song lead by one person.

“Get Loose. Get Loose. Get Funky. Get Funky. Get Down to the Beat. Get Down to the Beat. Get you whole body moving. Get your whole body moving. Starting with your feet. Starting with your feet. Oh your feet. Oh your feet.”

REPEAT and add a body part each time e.g. “And our knees”, “And your hips” etc.

Bungalow

One person starts the call, passes it to another to demonstrate and action, who then passes on the call to someone else.

“Hey [name of person], Hey [name of person], Let me see your bungalow. Let me see your bungalow.”

“My hands are high, My feet are low, and this is how I bungalow.” (Demonstrates an action of her choosing)

“Her hands are high, her feet are low, and this is how she bungalows.” (Copies action)

"Bungalow, bung-bung-a-low, bungalow, bung-bung-a-low." (Clapping the beat)
REPEAT

Guide Taps 

Traditionally used to close a guide meeting in the UK.

"Day is done, Gone the sun, From the sea, from the hills, from the sky, All is well, Safely rest, God is nigh."

(Recruiting More) Leaders of Aruba

Aruba has so many amazing volunteers working to support the work of the APG, and during our three weeks here we want to introduce you to some of them. So we will be taking portraits of some of the inspiring leaders we meet and telling you their stories. First up we have:

Angela, 18. Angela met us at the airport when we first arrived, helped to orientate us to the island and then participated in both days of our training for leaders this weekend. She has been involved in the APG for 13 years and is now a confident young woman preparing to vote in the elections for the first time. She now uses the skills she learnt as a Padvindster in her role as a Pioneer and leader with younger girls.

In order for APG to grow and for more girls to benefit from what guiding and scouting can offer, the organisation are looking to recruit more volunteers. We explored some of the ways we might do this in our second day of leader training and here we’ve created a list five of the ways we use in the UK that we talked about with links to useful resources.

1. Flyers, posters and postcards. In the training we talked about the value of talking to people face to face about guiding, but then being able to give them a business card or a flyer so they could get in touch again and find out more. In the UK, our guiding shop make posters, flyers and postcards that can be ordered for the cost of postage so that local units can use them to recruit more girls and adults. A selection of these can be viewed here
2. Presence at events. Having a presence at events is a great way to be seen. In the training we talked about national days and annual holidays like Mothers’ Day when APG members wear their smart uniforms and are visible in the community.
3. Social media and videos. We also discussed how we can use video in particular (through social media) to enable more people to see what guiding is all about. We showed two videos from Girlguiding UK (this one and this one) as inspiration, and Angela made this awesome one of our training session.
4. Involving students. Rachel talked about how her county in the UK work with the local university to encourage students to volunteer and Girlguiding UK have published this advice. Leaders were keen on this idea and thought it might also work well at the university in Aruba. 
5. Building a website. We find, in the UK, that its really useful to have a website where you can keep information about who to contact about joining guiding, what it’s all about and upcoming events. There’s some easy to use free hosts on the internet like this blogger site that our blog is hosted on, or www.weebly.com have some free packages.

Do you have any top tips on recruitment? What’s worked for you? Add them in the comments on here, Facebook or tweet us! 

Everyone Loves a Game of Elephant Football!

Two days of project delivery down and we’ve had the opportunity to meet and work with 21 leaders from Het Arubaanse Padvindsters Gilde so far: on Friday night we met the board and on Saturday we’ve delivered our first day of training for leaders on the island.

Saturday’s training took place at the APG clubhouse in Dakota with 17 leaders in attendance, representing a wide spread of ages and different units from across Aruba. Our activities focus on guiding principles, WAGGGS and promoting the opportunities offered by guiding, and our energisers in particular went down really well. Here’s a run down of some of the most highly rated (in smiles and laughter) of those energisers:

• Elephant Football: Standing in a circle everyone spreads their legs wide so their feet are touching their neighbours. Using your arms as a trunk you have to block the ball as it is knocked across the circle. If it goes through your legs you’re out and the circle gets smaller.
• Get Loose: This repeat after me song. This repeat after me song. Is Mirtha’s favourite. Is Mirtha’s favourite. And she lead it for us during the session to much applause.
• Me too: An icebreaker where someone in the centre of the circle shouts out a fact about themselves. If the fact also applies to you, you try and swap places with someone else and not get left as the last one in the middle.
• Human knot: Everyone holds hands with two other people across the circle (not those standing next to you) and then try and untangle yourselves back into a circle. This one needs problem solving and good communication skills.

During the session we also used some resources to introduce WAGGGS – including a card sort activity we first learnt at one of our briefing weekends. You can download that cards for this activity from here. We had some great feedback about how much had been learnt about WAGGGS during the session, but these are two of our favourite comments:

  

On Sunday we hope to see lots of familiar faces again and a few new ones for day two of leader training!

Live in Aruba and not currently involved in guiding? We have two sessions that are open to all where you can come along and find out more about the organisations. Both are 6-9pm, and we are at YMCA Dakota on the 6^th September and YMCA San Nicolas on the 7^th September. 

P.S. We've been making headway with our trip challenges: today Pippa met Rose-Ann who attended the World Scout Jamboree in the Netherlands in 1995 as a young member, we all did some yoga in the pool for Bridget's challenge, and Helen has been practising her hand-stand in the (relative) safety of the pool. 

What makes a good training?

Having spent Thursday acclimatising to the 30 degree heat and getting over our jet lag, Friday was time to get down to work. This weekend we will be running a total of 10 hours of training for existing Aruban leaders, so ahead of our meeting with the Board in the evening we took time during the day to plan out what activities we would include in the sessions.

 

We have been given a steer from last year’s team and the evaluation at the end of their project that leaders want us to cover guiding topics and some generic skills. With two days of training (we think with the same group at each) we split these into a Saturday session about guiding principles and WAGGGS, and followed this with Sunday’s session exploring communication and leadership skills.

It’s important to maintain energy and focus with such a long training session, so there’s many things you need to think about in terms of order and variety of activities. Here’s our top tips for training session planning:

1. Include ice-breakers. Not everyone will know each other before the session, so an ice-breaker is a great way to get people talking.
2. And make sure you introduce yourself as the trainers.
3. Mix it up with an energiser at least every hour or two – especially after a very serious or focused activity. Energisers are active games that encourage you to get up and move, sing, or start talking.
4. Plan more content that you need, but always be prepared that some activities will over run. Timings depend on the group so you need to be flexible in your approach and prepared for whatever may happen.
5. Include breaks. In a five hour training session everyone will need time for loo breaks, to get drinks and snacks or lunch. These might also be a chance for people to informally ask questions that they don’t want to ask in front of the whole group.
6. Be confident. We were selected for GOLD based on our potential to help develop another guiding organisation and have had a chance to practice our training skills during our briefings. Think about how fabulous the training will be and what all the participants will get out of it and avoid any worries about things going wrong.