Lack of employment, social involvement and other possibilities continually leads young generation to end up having a reactive rather than proactive life. This way, young people are continually found in cafes. Consequently, as a social norm or because of peer pressure they are led into drinking and smoking.
To be blamed for such an outcome is none of them but the context they are put into by the society instead of being taught to be involved in sports and arts.  We tried to challenge this context through Reflect Resilience Project. This way, we thought of providing the beneficiaries of the project with information on how bad habits they are continually led into influence them to be. To make this information and training session as convincing and reliable, doctors and real cases were presenting in front of the group.
What was being presented on the training sessions, led the group into discussions about the information and stories shown. The whole atmosphere created influenced 3 members of the group to open up about their addiction towards drinking and smoking and how they had been struggling to stop such addictions but never really made it. Assistance and help was offered to them by parallel ADRA Albania projects.
Furthermore, showing and training the young group on bad habits such as drugs and alcohol could not be enough when the context they are put in is so against any effort to change their mindset and lifestyle. For such a reason, the next training was focused on Physical Activities. In other words, our focus was not only to show them  how to be physically much more active but as well to offer them with insights into a different context and lifestyle. This different context and lifestyle might not be that popular but it was always there and satisfying as long as you want to make a difference to your life first of all.

This is why, after a 45 minutes training all the beneficiaries where taken to play paintballing. This unpopular activity would create show them that how much fun it can be to get out of a café –based lifestyle and practice different activities and sports. Most of all, this activity would create groups that would need to work and play with and against each other. Through this, the group would become more unified and they would serve as additional support to each others struggle.

The outcome of the above was seen very soon. All the beneficiaries wanted to continually communicate within one another and so one we suggested a personalized page on a social media as Facebook. This way, we could all share pictures and experiences we would have throughout each training session.
The beneficiaries themselves appointed one of the individuals to manage the page.  The page created has drown so much interest that it did not only unify the group but it also drew external intention to the point where within a week up to 100 individuals become part of the page and interested on the training being carried out. 
Tags: