Our Fabulous Kosovo Youth Volunteers
Jul 17, 2010
I’m really enjoying being back in Kosovo, especially being reunited with our fantastic Youth Volunteers. They work so hard, and I am so proud of them. I thought I’d explain a bit about how they come to be Youth Volunteers.
First of all, every Volunteer is a local of the country we are based in. (i.e., the Kosovo Youth Volunteers are all from Kosovo, the Uganda Youth Volunteers are all from Uganda, etc). We don’t bring outside volunteers into the countries where we work, because we want to develop a program that is completely locally-run and locally taught.
The first requirement to being a youth volunteer in Kosovo is that you must have been a student in the program for at least one year. The next is that you must have finished the 8th grade. Most of our youth volunteers have just finished 8th or 9th grade when they begin, but we also have teenagers who become youth volunteers as
late as 17 or even 18, sometimes in their last year of high school.
A new group of Youth Volunteers starts every July. Their 1st year as a youth volunteer they come to “regular” training one night per week and work on the Pennywhistle and Harmonica, and start learning teaching techniques. They practice teaching each other every week so they will be ready to start teaching the children in their 2nd year.
In their 2nd year as Youth Volunteers, they come 3 times each week.
First is the regular training listed above, second is ukulele, and third is conducting and drum combined.
In their 3rd year, they come 4 times each week–continuing with everything listed above and adding a beginning guitar class.
After the 3rd year, and sometimes before, they also teach training to the younger volunteers.
This is just the training schedule, and it goes on Monday to Friday year round.
For teaching the children, we have 2 different schedules –one during the school year and another during the summer. During the school year we only have classes with the children on Saturdays. During the summer, we have classes with the children every day from Monday-Friday.
It makes for a very focused schedule and the youth volunteers become very close friends with each other. I especially love the summers because we are together much more and I get to see the youth volunteers so often. The first week of school in September is always hard for me–I go through “youth volunteer withdrawal” and have to get used to only seeing them a few times each week instead of every day!
