Know Your Body, Know Your Rights2

Working at The YP Foundation (TYPF) is like being on a ship! At Project 19 at TYPF, where I work, today is the day where you’re sitting and relaxing, looking around seeing what is missing and what can be improved. Trying to add to the workshop formats, making lists, meeting professionals and writing blogs! You can almost be assured though, that it’s not going to stay like this for long though.

The past few weeks have been crazy. We finished conducting training evaluations with our peer education team by the 1st week of February after training with them for the last 4 months on young people’s sexuality, health and rights, then moved into conducting public workshops.

To backtrack a bit, Project 19 trains young people to become Peer Facilitators and address issues of HIV/AIDS, Sexuality, Health and Rights with their peers through community based forums and workshops. Peer Facilitators train over a 4-6 month period, developing independent research case studies, producing their own short films and literature and conducting awareness campaigns that engage decision makers, civil society and young people, advocating for increasing young people’s access to comprehensive sexuality education as well as youth friendly health services.

The project has reached out to over 1,500 young people across 5 states in India through its workshops and has also expanded nationally, to host The Project 19 Annual Festival that brings together over 600 marginalized and urban youth together in Delhi to lobby and articulate their collective rights to their sexual reproductive rights and health.

From the multiple workshops we have done this year, we experienced a very diverse audience with equally diverse expectations. From the feedback that we got it seems like all the participants were very receptive and we managed to give leave them with some food for thought regarding issues of sexuality, gender, sexual rights, body image and contraceptives in light of how these issues apply to their daily life.

The biggest challenge and aim of our workshops has been to not ‘theoreticise’ these terms or make young people realize that these issues are not just concepts that you can read or study about but facts and realities that you live with everyday.

At a workshop, it doesn’t seem like you’ve done much but there is A LOT of work going on ‘behind the scene’. From booking venues for workshops, coordinating with your team, to sitting up at night and painting cardboard cut outs for the campaign, it’s incredible how much hard work goes into putting those 3 hours together. (Please believe me!)

So yesterday was a STORM, on board The YP Foundation. We did our 5th workshop at Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies better known as CBS. In your average sailing day, for us CBS was definitely uncharted territory!

Our workshop was suppose to start at 12.30pm with our ‘KNOW YOUR BODY, KNOW YOUR RIGHTS’ Campaign at 10.30 a.m. But that didn’t happen as the entire team got lost – we managed to finally reach by 11, after driving through narrow village lanes, crazy traffic jams, and light-bulb moments of ‘how BIG Delhi really is’! We finally started our workshop around 1pm, with 20 people in the conference room. That’s an ideal number of people for a workshop such as this one.

The workshop started on a good note and everyone seemed to be enjoying the session! Over the past 5 workshops we’ve got a good response on the format. The exercises take us through auctioning off people’s rights needs and wants, making participants chart their bodies, induce a deliberate battle-of-the-sexes, explore their acting skills and grill them to break down their thoughts!

And CBS was no different. While some students had to rush back to class in the middle of the session the ones who stayed seemed to have a great time – we had an especially fantastic role-play between two students negotiating condom use!

The next port that we have to reach is two day training workshop on the 19th and 20th of march, the nerves are slowly showing as we wait for applicants, finalize session formats and confirm our partnerships but I have a good feeling about this one .

We are hoping to train around 20 volunteers for 2 days on issues relating to sexuality, gender and rights through innovative games and discussions for people who want to start projects in the coming year in their institutions, so lets hope no one gets sea-sick in the next couple of days.

All in all yesterday was another exciting day at Project 19, and we still have a few seas to cross – a 2 day training – before the ship can finally anchor for the year More on that soon!

Suvidhi Khurana
Administrative Liaision
Project 19