Training session for Indigo key members

On Sunday, 18 April 2010, VPV (Volunteers for peace Vietnam) organized a special training session for Indigo key members with an aim to improving the communication between facilitators and workshop participants. Under the control of Mr. Lam, Ms. Hong and Sarah from VPV, Indigo received a lot of useful lessons that can apply to Indigo workshops as well as other kinds of public activities.

The training kicked off with a series of games: hand-shaking game, greeting game and watermelon-eating game.

The first game brought up a messy scene as all participants stood in 2 circle, the smaller circle inside the bigger circle and started to shake hands with each other in no order. The chaos was ended after Mr. Lam revealed the purpose of the game: to show that in public activities, controlling the participants’ actions is the most important.

Sarah is noting down important things we learned from the training

The greeting game gave us another lesson in how to make aquaintant with people in a friendly way. Similarly, the third game – watermelon eating – demonstrated the necessity of quick response and listening skills.

After 3 warm-up games, the training went on with 3 exercises which required more brainstorming, teamwork and physical activities!

First, each participant was allowed to choose 2 pictures from a load of pictures about human’s impact on the environment cut from newspaper and magazines. Then all participants were divided into groups of 3 and had to make up a complete story from those 6 pictures. Creativity was pushed to the maximum, which reflected in the diverse topics created, from Tay Nguyen’s urbanization to Iran and Russia’s meeting and the reasons for climate change. Through this game, teamwork and communication skills were effectively used and improved!

Waiting for their team to present the story

The next exercise focused on the connecting skill, by dividing the participants into 2 teams, showing each team a picture and requiring them draw that picture based on the descriptions of teammates. The final result showed a big gap between the two teams and obviously demonstrated which team was better at finding the important details, describing accurately and quicker in transfering the data.

The last and also the hardest exercise was for the participants to guest Laura’s height based on pieces of information, 2 of which were given to each participant. Only one participant gave the right answer, the others just missed out one important datum. What did we learn from that? The core of teamwork was sharing and asking.

For the conclusion, Sarah gave us a number of key learnings from the training, all of which were extremely useful and can apply to our next workshops. Be assured that when you guys come back to Indigo, you will realize the difference in our way of organization thanks to this training.

Thanks Mr Lam, Ms Hong, Sarah, Indigo key members and participants who brought us a meaningful and practical training!