While in Santiago, we stayed with a host family of our close friend, Eric. Eric is a Dominican, studying Music Therapy in New Orleans at Loyola University with his colleague Alex Legges. These guys were doing such amazing work around the city, outside of our work in Recrear, that we asked them to come do a short activity with our work group. This video is the testament to their ability to connect individuals through the art of music. We look forward to working with them in the future through our New Orleans local chapter.
While working to inspire a community to make a lasting change for themselves, when the community has never thought critically about the possibility to start a movement from within; it could be easily forgotten that the best work stems from the work you do while having fun. We are spending hours a day pushing ourselves, and our participants, to basically create meaningful work for themselves. However, the time spent building connections across cultural boundairs should not overlook the possibility to have fun.
Every day we are in our workshops we introduce different ways to build team camaraderie, and sometimes that means to just play a game. My experiance working at my university on our Orientation staff has given me a wide variety of activites and I loved having this opportunity to see how well they would translate for a different target group.
Above, you can witness one of our more successful ‘Icebreakers’. In this one, called Animal Farm, we have the participants close their eyes and make a predetermined animal noise(told to them secretly). Then, when the game begins everyone must call and then listen for the appropriate matching animal. At the end of the game, everyone will be grouped in the corresponding animal group.
This is just one example of a variety of different games we play, but it was one of the most successful attempts to take ourselves out of the stress of project management and just enjoy our brief time together.
Recrear Participación 