By Soondo Mutewa, YSD Zambia President
From the 21st to the 25th of December, 2022, the Youth and Students Department (YSD) held a 4-day workshop for our internal youth from grades 9 to 12; we also had two participants who were in grade 7. There were 16 sisters and 11 brothers who could participate in this workshop which was held at HJ Cheonbo, Lusaka. We had four CIG missionary brothers from the USA, one brother from South Africa, two sisters from Malawi, one sister and three brothers from Ndola, Zambia. Its purpose was to support the education of our internal youth. The workshop theme was ‘Find God, Find True Parents, Find Myself’.
For this workshop, we changed the education style; instead of having only lectures and guidance we decided to use a combination of lectures in the morning and team-building games and activities connected to the main topics of the lectures in the afternoon. We found this method to be more effective in the children’s learning as they could process the content of the lectures in different ways through the games and activities.
The 4th day of the workshop was a Christmas service party for the whole church. We had 3 main days for lectures: the first day focused on ‘finding God’ and the lecturers were Rev. Phiri and Esnart Mumba; the second day focused on ‘finding True Parents’ and the lecturers were the Regional Vice President and Special Youth Envoy (SYE) Phillip Karamagi; and the third day of lectures focused on ‘finding myself’ and the lecturers were SYE Phillip Karamagi and Soondo Mutewa, President of YSD.
We also had a lecture on the tradition because we noticed that the youth seemed to be struggling with some aspects of the tradition. We gave the youth regular quizzes on content from the lectures so that we could get a view of how much they were able to grasp from the lectures and also help them remember the content of the lectures.
The participants enjoyed the workshop: many of them mentioned that they enjoyed the food and being able to meet and interact with their peers from different nations and different towns. As the staff, we are grateful to Heavenly Parent and True Parents that we could create the environment for these teenagers to begin the process of finding God, finding True Parents and finding their true selves.
