CITY GUIDE >Culture and Events
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CITY GUIDE >Culture and Events
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A dramatic difference
By Carissa Welton (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-06-03 10:43 Another teenager says: "Hua Dan has helped me to miss my relatives less and is like a new family to me." The organization's success has a lot to do with the localization of the program. Gao and assistant manager Guo Jinlian are both locals who can speak the Sichuan dialect with the children. "Gao's own home was destroyed in the quake," says Peta Khan, Hua Dan's director of development. "We've enabled (Gao's) determination to give something back to her community." As the only full-time members of the Sichuan office currently, Gao and Guo are in charge of everything related to the organization's operations including volunteer training, workshop scheduling, curriculum design, public communication, and fund-raising. The theater workshops focus on seven skill sets: leadership, self-confidence, effective communication, self-awareness, problem-solving, teamwork and creativity. They are held once a week and last for eight weeks. Each ends with a performance for families, classmates, teachers and the surrounding community. Rather than just teaching or directing, Hua Dan believes the best way to inspire individuals to "think outside the box" about their future and the world around them is by using an interactive approach, where each member is involved and has the chance to contribute to the process of creating an art piece. Just before the one-year anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake, it began a new workshop at Shuimo Middle School with freshly trained facilitators recruited from Leshan Normal University. Eight out of 20 student volunteers were selected after intensive two-day training. This August, Hua Dan will launch Staging the Future, a cross-cultural artists exchange and children's workshop program. The one-week summer camp will celebrate Sichuan's "resilience, strength and hope for the future". A select number of international volunteer artists, with various backgrounds in performance and stage production, will share their techniques and crafts with 12 local artists. Together, these artists will become facilitators and workshop leaders that will offer Hua Dan's unique method of individual learning and healing to 100 children chosen from various earthquake disaster regions. For more information on the students' current progress or Hua Dan programs, visit www.hua-dan.org
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