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Character Education
Summer Camps Serve Jamaican Children
Written by UPF-Jamaica
Friday, August 14, 2009
Jamaica - Two summer camps for children in depressed areas of Jamaica featured life skills training, sports, and character education. The first camp was at the Half Way Tree Primary School and the second at the Braeton Primary and Junior High School. The Caribbean Community provided funding.
Seventy children attended the first camp, held at the Half Way Tree Primary School north of Kingston August 3-7. Facilitators engaged children from ages 10 to 14 from Jones Town, Ackee Walk, and Arnette Gardens on various topics.
The site for the second camp was Braeton Primary and Junior High School. The camp, held August 10 to 14, had a large turn out of approximately 180 youths from the community of Old Braeton in Saint Catherine's Parish, west of Kingston.
The theme for this year was Life Skills and HIV/AIDS prevention. The program integrated vital components of character development such as self esteem, conflict resolution, HIV/AIDS prevention, abstinence until marriage, and personal development in an entertaining and participatory environment.
Facilitators, including four volunteer interns from the United States who had been trained through Universal Peace Federation's Character Education Initiative, utilized role plays, multi-media presentations, and group discussions from Discovering The Real Me manuals to get the message across.
Participants were treated to a wealth of information disseminated by keynote speakers who graciously gave of their time, including Dr. Morella Josephs from the Caribbean Community, who had a heart to heart talk with the youth on values and attitudes; Dr. Bongelo Gombele, who spoke on Drug Abuse and HIV/AIDS prevention; Dr. Leachim Semaj, who shared his 10 Commandments for Success; and Mr. Dennis Salmon, who focused on character education.
There were coaching sessions for football enthusiasts and aerobic exercises and games for all.
This was the camp’s second year and, based on the enthusiastic response, definitely not its last, as the Caribbean Community seeks to integrate life skills in the curriculum of schools across Member States.
The Caribbean Community (CARICOM), is an organization of 15 Caribbean nations and dependencies. Its main purposes are to promote economic integration and cooperation among its members, to ensure that the benefits of integration are equitably shared, and to coordinate foreign policy. These summer camps were sponsored by the Secretariat, which based in Georgetown, Guyana, as part of its mandate to introduce health and family life education to Caribbean nationals.
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