Marco Carvalho
Dance and drawing lessons, cooking sessions, language classes and much, much more. The Diocesan Pastoral Youth Center will answer once again the needs of dozens of local families, by promoting in July and August a broad program of summer activities aimed at entertaining and educating children. The initiative will once again be centered on Saint Joseph’s Church, in Hac Sa Wan. Tammy Chio Chu Cheng, Secretary-general of the Diocesan Pastoral Youth Center, spoke to O Clarim about the challenges of keeping children busy in a pandemic-stricken Macau.
The academic year is almost over and this is, in a certain sense, a problem for many local families, because they will have to find a way to entertain their kids at home. The Pastoral Youth Center is one of the organizations that promotes a vast array of activities to entertain and educate children. What sort of activities should we expect this year?
Well, most of the students are still taking their exams. After the exams are finished, our intention is to start preparing for these activities. We will give some formation to our young volunteers. After this formation period is complete, they will work with the kids who will take part in our summer activities. These formation sessions will start next week. All in all, we will promote four formation sessions and after those sessions, our volunteers will have to prepare their own proposals and programs. These proposals will depend on the volunteers and on what they can do. Some are quite skilled in activities such as drawing and dancing and they can use their talent to teach our children. The summer activities will start on the 24th of July and they will last until the 14th of August.
These activities will take place everyday, during these three weeks?
From Monday to Saturday. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, last year we were forced to promote a different kind of experience. We tried to separate the children into two different classes. Class A would come on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The other class would come the rest of the days. We chose this system to allow every kid that joins our activities to take part in the activities three times a week.
Will the Catholic Youth Center adopt this very same model this year?
Yes, because this previous experience was quite successful. Before Covid-19 happened, they could come everyday. The same happened with our volunteers. This year we have almost 70 volunteers. They conveyed their interest to join our activities. Concerning the children, accounting the two classes combined together, we will have about 100 kids.
You will have 70 volunteers monitoring 100 kids …
Yes. Nevertheless, the volunteers won’t come everyday, because they have their own activities also. Most of them are teenagers. They can join the activities organized by other associations or by the Government. They have that opportunity. But we told them that they have to come at least three times a week. If they come three times a week, we will grant them a certificate saying that they joined our summer activities as volunteers.
A certificate that might be useful for them in the future. We live in a society that prizes voluntary work and that prizes this kind of initiative. Do you think that this kind of work can be something that enriches their experience?
Yes, of course. One third of the 70 volunteers will be joining us for the first time. If our young volunteers feel that our program is a good program, they will encourage their friends to come and join us. We are happy to see that sort of outcome. I don’t have specific data to show you, but another curious thing is that a great number of them, after they complete secondary school, they choose to become teachers or social workers. This is something that I feel very proud about.
You were mentioning a very curious detail a few moments ago. You were saying that the monitors choose the kind of activities that they want to promote. What sort of activities can the kids expect from this program?
If you ask the kids, they will tell you that this program is full of people and these people are full of love for them. They care a lot about the volunteers and they feel that the volunteers care about them. When the summer program is over, they always ask their parents when they can rejoin the activities. We can really feel that they love this program but it doesn’t really depend on the activities. It depends, mostly, on the people. They feel loved. Children feel that the volunteers really care about them.
You were mentioning there are new volunteers joining this program every year. Does the same thing happen with the children? Are you expecting the same children that took part in the activities last year to join in this year?
The activities this year will also take place in the church of Saint Joseph The Worker, in Hac Sa Wan, and most of the children come from that area. There are a few, a very small number of them, who live in Taipa and in other places, but it’s harder for them due to the distance, the traffic and all that. The activities take place in the afternoon.
How old are the kids that join the activities?
They are aged from 5 to 11. But most of them, nevertheless, are aged from 5 to 9. It’s easier to provide for their needs if we have in mind their age groups.
What would you say are the activities they like the most? What sort of activities do they feel more attracted to?
Cooking, drawing and playing games with one another, mainly with the kids of the same age. We try to provide them with group activities every day. They can have snacks together after the activities. They like to eat.
Is it also an opportunity for these young children to learn how to share and to be part of a community?
T.C: Yes, of course. We hope that, as they are growing, they can learn how to care about others. This is the hidden agenda of the activities we promote. Our aim is not merely to provide activities to entertain these kids. They have to care, they have to learn how to care for the others, about the volunteers that are sitting beside them, the other kids and about their own parents.
You were mentioning the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic … The number of children that you will accept is pretty much the same as last year? Or was there an increase?
There was no increase. We will accept the same number of children,
How much will it cost for a family to enrol a child In these activities?
Just one hundred patacas. It’s a symbolic price. We don’t like to promote things for free, because people think of free things as having no quality. Families have to pay something, despite it being a small amount. I have mentioned before that we have around 70 volunteers. They are all locals and they come from different schools. They don’t come exclusively from Catholic schools. If we take the Catholics schools from the equation, probably these summer activities are one of the most important ways of promoting evangelization. We don’t call it evangelization, but that’s what we are doing.
You were mentioning that some of these young volunteers don’t even come from Catholic schools. Do you see these kids being influenced by these activities? Have any of these kids grown an interest in Catholicism after taking part in these summer activities?
What I can safely say is that we share the values of our faith. Some of them, many years after they had taken part in these activities, decided to join Catechism classes and they became Catholic. But this number is very, very small. But we share the faith. We share the values of our faith. Every year I ask them “Do you know why we do this? Why we promote these activities?” It is not because we have a lot of money or because there are no alternatives to what we do. Other communities are doing the same, although we don’t compare ourselves to them. We share the values of our faith because we care. We care about these children, we care about their parents. We care about people that who have the opportunity to go out of Macau and experience other sorts of activities.
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