Thuli's thoughts on working with The House of Young Ambassadors

My story of being a facilitator for House of Young Ambassadors (Thulisiwe Mpanza): Since I started working for Life line West Rand I‘ve been participating on different activities around the community of Mogale City. Working with Project Hope on the project called HYA (House of Young Ambassadors) gave me a great experience especially because we work with children from different backgrounds. I learned a lot hosting their workshops.

I used to educate elderly people and not children so at first it wasn’t easy to cope but I learned that I must go at their pace. One of the things I realized is that it is important to ask the children questions about their feelings and their lives, especially since not all children tell you everything themselves and by also looking at their non-verbal behavior I could tell a lot about how they feel. I really enjoyed listening to them and learned to be patient and do everything passionately. The children are very different and come from different homes and in the future I will try to spend more time with them, since I can learn a lot from working with them. Unfortunately we had only limited time, but sometimes the kids were so engaged in a topic that they did not want to leave. What surprised me is that a lot of the children, when they are not able to make it to a workshop, are not used to sending their apologies, they don’t even know that this is a good habit!