And now the conflict starts!

We arrived at the Casa Telmex this morning to begin the third week of our session. When the students and facilitators arrived, everyone shared their best and worst parts of the past week. We think that this is a good way to begin the week because everyone can share what they did during the weekend or which activities they liked the most or least. Our first activity for the day was “Back to Back” which we began last Friday. Vania led the activity and began with the students in pairs but at the end, we did it with everyone in one large group. Many found that this activity was easy in larger groups and it was a good opportunity to practice working in a team and communicating. After, we did an activity in our blogs where we thought about what we had already learned and what we would like to learn in the second part of the program. This past Friday was the middle of the program and it seemed to us that today was a good day to reflect some about the thing that we have done before we continue with the rest of the program. After the blogs, we began with an activity about conflict and how we can manage conflict in our lives. The first part is a survey that is called “How do you manage conflict?” The survey has questions about how you manage conflict and based on the results, each person has a specific way in which they manage conflict. There are 5 types of people: competitive, collaborative, compromising, evasive, and submissive. Many of the people in the program were the collaborative and compromising types. We had a good discussion about the different types and which characteristics then have in common. At the end, we had a discussion with all the groups and some of the students shared their thoughts about the different types. Our final activity was led by Elisa and is called “Conflict”. Elisa was a symbol for conflict and all everyone arranged themselves around her in a way to show how they deal with conflict in their lives. Because of this, some were far away and others were very close to the conflict. We discussed a little bit about how and why we decided our positions. We think that our session today was a good way to reflect about the past sessions and introduce the themes that we are going to discuss for the rest of the program. When we finished the session with the kids, we stayed with the facilitators to discuss how the activities led by the facilitators last week went and to choose 2 new volunteers for the next days. They thought that the activities from last week went well in general. Our next volunteers for tomorrow and Wednesday are Reyna and Osiris.

For lunch, we went to the same restaurant with the fish that we visited last week. We had more fish and cocktails with shrimp and octopus. All of the food was delicious and we liked it a lot. We spoke some with Reyna about our trip to Puerta Arista and Boca Del Cielo (The Mouth of Heaven) for next weekend. We are very excited!