In January, when we - 6 young people from Armenia - traveled to Washington DC to participate in VITA (Volunteer Initiative in Turkey and Armenia) project organized by HasNa Inc., no one of us imagined, I think, that by today we would have done a great follow-up project in Armenia. After learning lots of skills we came back to Armenia and a few months later we met again to implement a follow up project called VITAmini.
As a target group were chosen young people from 4 different marzes (regions) of Armenia - Shirak, Lori, Tavush and Gegharkunik. And it's not a coincidence that these 4 marzes are bordering regions with neighbour countries. One by one we visited the main cities of these marzes - Gyumri, Vanadzor, Dilijan, Gavar. Let's move step by step and tell what we did during these 4 amazing days.
Day 1 - Gyumri
After meeting in Yerevan the group of 7 people took their way to Gyumri, second biggest city in Armenia, which also was the cultural capital of CIS in 2013. I was waiting for them in Gyumri, as it's my home city. Nearly at 10 a.m. our group was inside the facilities of ASUE (Armenian State University of Economics) Gyumri Branch Basic College. 15 young students of the college were there, too. And show went on :)
Mariam started to teach them how to dance an Armenian ethnic dance called "Tsakhkadzor", because Mariam was planning in her follow-up project to have a big dance festival in Armenia, and why not start now? Surprisingly, teenagers were too fast in learning it. A bit later they were ready to show how they can dance. The day started in the best possible way.
Then we went to the second part of our training, held by Gevorg A. and Gevorg L. (two Gevorgs). At first Gevorg Adamyan told the teenagers how the system of internet is working and how it was born. Then he let the youth know how to safely surf the web, how to choose safe passwords and what can be affects of not thinking about internet security.
After the first part and a short ice-breaker, we moved on to the second part of this stage - how to use social media correctly. During this part I taught what are the main types of social media, how to use them not only for chatting and having fun, but also make benefit of them. We talked about social networks (facebook, etc.), about microblogs and blogs (twitter, blogger, wordpress, etc.), about photo and video sharing web-sites (youtube, flickr, picasa, etc.) and finished with cloud services (Google drive, DropBox, etc.).
After that the time for Samvel has come. He helped the youth to realize what are the harms of using non-healthy food, like fast food and drinking soda. He told them how to chose healthy food, how to chose correct time for eating. And two videos were shown for gaining more detailed knowledge about the harms of fast food and soda.
After a quick lunch, the final stage of our training session started. Knarik and Tamara spoke about volunteering, who can be a volunteer and what are benefits of volunteering. The lesson was accompanied with a beautiful presentation. After completing our task - teaching how to become a volunteer and how to collect a team, we went to the museums of two famous armenian writers, Avetik Isahakyan and Hovhannes Shiraz. These museums used to be their houses, and we helped to clean the areas from weed and prepare it for flowers to be planted later.
Mission accomplished. A new group of volunteers was started in Gyumri.
After a busy day we spent some time on sightseeing. At the end of the day we had a dinner and set our minds on the second day of our training.
P.S. At the end we would like to thank the principal of the "ASUE Gyumri branch basic college" Mrs. Nara Chakhoyan for hosting us and providing all the necessary equipment.
To be continued...
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