HomeDREAMBlantyre, Malawi – Conclusion of activists’ course
05
Mar
2009
05 - Mar - 2009



 

The XIV training course for activists organized by DREAM has come to an end. As reported in the previous newsletter, about a hundred activists from differing parts of Malawi participated in the course. The novelty of this year’s course was that for the first time numerous activists from some of the most isolated rural parts of the country were able to participate.
This presented the challenge of training people totally unused to a city life style and who often had little formal education.
DREAM is rapidly becoming more widespread throughout areas of Malawi where health services are in short supply and in any case very difficult to reach. The objective therefore is to train a group of people who are able to establish contact with those for whom it would otherwise be impossible to have access to health education and treatment worthy of the name.
Desire for training and constant commitment characterized the participants’ involvement. Even during the breaks they gathered together in the classroom to go over the lessons, and in particular to translate what they had learnt into the local language, Chichewa, in order to be sure they had understood correctly and to commit the new knowledge to memory.
 
The course participants’ level of commitment is confirmation that Malawi’s richest resource is its people and it is in training them that we need to invest. The transformation of people who were once sick and on the fringe of society into activists at the forefront of the battle against AIDS and working for the renewal of Malawi can symbolize a more general transformation of the entire country.
 

 

Many expressed their gratitude during the closing ceremony: “Those who taught us are university professors but nevertheless they made their lessons really accessible. Thank you. Now that we have learnt so many things and we have received so much from DREAM, it is time to begin to give back some of all this in our villages among the sick and those who are in need”.
The ceremony closed with the awarding of diplomas to all the course participants.

  

 

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