Friday, February 12th, 2010: Second Junior Youth Group Meeting in Our Home
One of the activities that makes us so happy here is animating the Jr. Youth group in our neighborhood. For a while, previous to the start of the group, we had been trying to talk to different Jr. youth and their parents in the neighborhood and get a group started here. We met with a lot of enthusiasm from the families, but when the time came that we had set to have our first meeting, only one Jr. Youth was actually home and ready to come. It was a little disappointing but we got to chat with him (Muhammad) and re-plan to have the group the next Friday, in the mean time talking to more Jr. youth and the ones we had already talked to. The next meeting we had three jr. youth come, and even though it was small, it was a really successful meeting. We talked about service, excellence, our interests and all that group jazz and the group came up with a lot of ideas for service projects and recreation ideas.
This meeting, we had four junior youth! So we are slowly adding on to the group. We had also a couple weeks back talked with a young 23 year old guy in the neighborhood (our next door neighbor) about the group and this time he came to help out! We were so happy about this because one of our main goals here is to train animators to work with the Junior Youth program. He really participated in the group discussions and brought out some great points that, cool enough, were very close to the ideas presented in Book 5! We got to talk to him a little at the end about the program happening all around the world and little bit of the vision of the program. Hopefully later on we can bring up the idea of him studying to become an animator!
Let's take a look at what one of our animators of the group has to say about his experience.
Andrew Cornwell, 21 yrs:
"Junior Youth Group has been an awesome experience so far. There have been a number of times when we have gone out with the intention to share Anna's Presentation with people in our neighborhood, only to end up meeting junior youth interested in coming to the group instead. Sometimes it seems like the junior youth are not overly excited about the group when we first introduce the program to them. Later though we find out they go home and tell their parents about it or were waiting to come to the meeting! Already one of the parents gave us food and drink for the group, and group has had some really cool ideas for service and activities they want to do. I am impressed!"
Invitation Made by one of the Jr. Youth to invite others to join the group
