For international youth day British and Honduran volunteers organised and carried out an event in the rural community of La Asomada. The turnout was great, with many people coming from the surrounding villages such as El Tablon, El Zapote and Catatao to name a few.
The purpose of the day was to simply celebrate youth. The focus of international youth day this year was mental health awareness. We hoped that by getting the youth involved in the event it would encourage awareness of these ideas and generally improve self-confidence and engagement of the youth in their own community.
The local school was used as a music station, with a sound system set up on a makeshift stage which was later used for a talent show. There was also a bracelet making stall placed near the stage which proved to be extremely popular with the countless children.
We held a football tournament and a dodgeball tournament; using sports to empower and inspire self-confidence in the youth can be hugely successful. The majority of males took to the football field to either participate in or watch the football tournament. Dodgeball was played on the large central field. More females took part in this than the football. Lots of women and girls also came to the school to listen to the music show or engage in the bracelet making. We organised many other stalls to grab the attention of young people within the community. We had large queues for face painting, whilst some of our female national volunteers offered a very special skirt making workshop, as well as inventive arts and crafts sessions. I delivered a theatre workshop, focused on the international theme of youth day; mental health awareness. We had many young people who wanted to be involved. We worked on improving and reflecting upon self-confidence, ambition for the future, and bravery. We did this by learning how to tell stories through movement and mime.
The talent show in the evening proved to be a fantastic culmination of all our hard work throughout the day. We set up a stage with speakers and a sound system, and one by one many different people from the community performed their talents for friends and family. This drew in large crowds of young people from many different villages, and it was great to see the confidence of young people as they performed their talents. We met lots of new people, and become more integrated and welcomed into the community. We were all pleasantly surprised at the amount of people willing to participate in the talent show; we watched break dancers, street dance, singers and also musicians. It was a wonderful feeling to watch the community come together to celebrate each other's talents, and it is a memory which we will all cherish when we reflect upon our time in Honduras.
By ICS volunteers Emma Hooper and Ben Anson
