Life changing

16 July 2008

‘I’m meeting the Home Secretary next Wednesday and giving a radio interview on Friday, then meeting the Police to build better relations between them and young people.’

No, it’s not a member of the Cabinet, but one of the young people from South Wales who just three short months ago hadn’t ever had their voice heard on anything, let alone international and domestic youth justice issues. Just three short months ago they hadn’t been to Sierra Leone…
 
‘I’m going to need a diary and a mobile phone,’ Darren tells me.
 
And, like four fellow delegates on the Youth Justice in Action delegation to Sierra Leone, Darren is now training to be a youth worker as a direct result of his experience.

The visit was a joint YMCA Wales/Y Care International event, bringing together young people from Cardiff, Port Talbot and Mountain Ash YMCAs with their counterparts in Sierra Leone, exploring, comparing and discussing youth justice issues with Youth Justice in Action campaigners there.
 
As a member of Y Care International’s Campaigns and Global Youth Work Department, ‘life changing’ is a phrase that I hear used all the time. I use it myself and it seems to be being devalued from overuse. Yet each time we check in with the marginalised young people we work with, we hear stories like Darren’s.
 
In Cardiff last week, my colleagues and I caught up with a handful of the delegation of young people to follow up on the visit. We looked at newspaper articles, heard about national radio interviews, shared experiences of visiting Parliament, of speaking to Anthony Hopkins (Port Talbot YMCA’s most famous alumni), about the Sierra Leone experience. We laughed at memories and photographs, we sat quiet at others… the sewage filled river in Kroo Bay - an informal settlement built on a rubbish dump - the pigs and children sharing the same foul drinking water… the ‘justice’ meted out in the juvenile court… the poverty…
 
In amongst his busy schedule, in which Darren will have 30 minutes face-to-face time with Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, Darren’s meeting with the Police will see him working as a direct link between the officers and young people in the community at risk of offending,
 
‘I’ll go out and talk directly with the young people.’
 
This is part of Darren’s youth work training, as is his and everyone else’s placement in Y Care International’s global tent ‘The Rolling Globe’ at YMCA Europe’s upcoming youth festival in Prague. They will be delivering workshops based on their experiences in Sierra Leone; something they probably couldn’t have imagined three months ago.
 
At Y Care International, we say the primary basis of our global youth work is that of education for social change, making change in individuals, communities and global society.
 
At Y Care International, we say we have evidence of the greater value and importance of global youth work when working with marginalised young people...
 
At Y Care International, we say our global youth work is life changing…
 
In Cardiff last week, Darren and the others were living proof of all we say…

By Stuart Wroe, Senior Global Youth Work Coordinator