As Mental Health Awareness month awareness ends, we note the importance of building life skills to cope with challenges, review our sessions and activities this year as well as celebrate our Social Workers, Tigist and Beniyam, in their hard efforts to regularly support, maintain and improve the mental health of the children and youth we support.
One of the key aspects of BHE’s holistic care program is supporting children and youth with counseling and life skills building so that they address past trauma and become empowered to face life’s challenges with effective tools. Counseling is provided by our social workers on a regular basis to ensure vulnerable children with past trauma have a path towards healing.
Our life skills sessions involve addressing a variety of topics including positive thinking, resilience, coping tools, study and self discipline among others. This is to help them build their creativity, self expression and confidence as well as debating, discussing and communicating tools. Here are some of the life skills building sessions we had this year.
As Albert Einstein says “Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.” We use engaging activities to support the children’s creativity. They engaged in drawing and coloring activities at our drop in center. As the younger kids expressed their artistic skills, the older youth practiced goal setting. They filled out a guide that helps them identify key goals. One of the youth, Elias, inspiringly expressed that "setting goals is the first step in turning the unseen into tangible result".
On our Saturday session building life skills, we discussed how to mentally resilient people cope with challenges in life. The children and youth had lively discussions about how to take control of situations, reframe thoughts and stay strong through difficult times. We shared a story on how a person's reaction matters more than what happened to her or him. The youth reflected on the story and the lesson behind it.
““You will change the future if you have a clear mind and have a strong will to do so.””
We also discussed the children's rights and responsibilities as part of our key mission to create a safe environment where children can thrive. Our social workers provided a refresher for the children of BHE's child protection policy, reporting mechanisms and how their wellbeing is our program's main priority.
The children and youth expressed what they feel are their responsibilities as we mentioned our BHE values of honesty, excellence, caring, respect and unity. Afterwards, the youth enjoyed playing table tennis as the children played hide and seek for some recreation before having their meal at our drop in center.
In our Saturday session practicing positive thinking
In one group session the children participated on writing out how they want to be remembered. The activity helped them review their self awareness, attitudes, behavior and interaction with others as they expressed what qualities they would like others to think of them by.
Zemzem wanted "to be remembered as a person who could make people laugh". Yibeltal wished "to be remembered as a kind person". Sofia wanted "to be remembered as one who helped others". Lemma wished "to be known for lifting people up, not putting them down". We are proud of their ability to reflect and desire to have a positive impact.
In our most recent Saturday session, the children had fun working on word crossword puzzles and learning the meaning of different English words. This was to build up their vocabulary through active learning. The youth also had a lively discussion on the six virtues of positive psychology, the benefits of listening to their strength and how they can use their strength to solve problems they encounter.
Our life skills and counseling sessions support the mental health of children and youth in our program so that they are healed from past trauma and well equipped to face life’s challenges. Our mission is to provide holistic care and support for orphaned and vulnerable children and youth so they become self reliant adults and thrive in their future.