Active Citizens, Awareness Raising... & Pizza Party!

Another busy week for Team AVO! We are half way through our placement (how quickly time goes!), and into our routine of juggling many activities with AVO. We are all seeing progress and striding forward with our ambitious plans, with many more very exciting activities to come.

A crucial part of the ICS journey for all volunteers is to use our experiences within our placement to grow as people and become more active citizens. As active citizens, we want to be drivers for change, contributing to local and global goals to improves lives for people around the world. Within our placement, every week we learn, research, and present discussions about different topics; including diversity and identity, international development, global sustainable development goals. This week we discussed about social justice and human rights, something we are all passionate about, and we enjoyed hearty debates, exchanging ideas and challenging our own perspectives, whilst also improving our presentation skills. It has been extremely rewarding for us to have these discussions, and we are all feeling encouraged to know we can make a difference to our world, even after we finish our voluntary work here.

On Tuesday 8^th November, we travelled to Doulou, another village outside Koudougou, to deliver our second awareness raising session for men and women. We managed to cover more topics this time around (and improving our French and Mooré presentation skills), to speak about hygiene, access to healthcare, and the importance of education for girls. We were accompanied by the partner's Animatrice who helped with our demonstrations and presented about the consequences of FGM. After, we managed to collect more data with a survey which assessed the women’s stance on their needs and living conditions and rights. It was a huge success, and great to see everyone engaged and enthusiastic, with lots of laughs at our demonstrations! We are definitely looking forward to our future sessions.

Delivering presentation on hygiene, access to healthcare,
and importance of education for girls

Demonstrations on how to correctly wash the body

Unfortunately, some sad news for our team - we had to say goodbye to two of our volunteers (but once Team AVO, always Team AVO!) On Saturday, we celebrated our time all together with a Pizza Party!!... yes that’s right I said PIZZA! After many many many rice-based meals, we were all having huge cravings, and decided to scavenge together some ingredients to make pizza and crêpes! We were all beyond excited, and while it was the longest wait ever… it was worth it! With happy stomachs, we had fun social night playing cards, drinking shots of local tea, and sending all our best wishes and love to our friends for life. 

Team AVO forever !

Written by Lilly Harvey (British volunteer)