In  September 2024, I taught many Transformational Community Development (TCD) lessons and awareness activities in my village.

I arranged the Training of Trainers (ToT) training in the 3rd Quarter on 20-23 September. There were 30 people participating in the training. The three trainers were Sushil, Sanjay, and myself, Imanual. We completed the training very well. I will share two stories from this ToT training.

Lokkhi lives in Sarha Village in the Dinajpur District. She got married at the age of 12, and now she is 47 years old. She faced many problems in her life, but she had never received this kind of training in her life. She said, “I am very happy to learn many new things through this TCD training which is very helpful to live together in the best way.” Lokkhi mentioned the Mountain Story because she learned how to find out the problems of the community and to solve them by themselves. She also said that she learned how to help one another with problems from the River Crossing drama. She is very happy to have the opportunity to be a participant in this training. Lokkhi thanked me for this training.

Amin is a member of Sharha Village, Dinajpur district, and he attended our TCD Committee Training. He was quiet throughout the training and listened attentively to all the sessions. At the end, when we wanted to hear feedback from those who didn’t speak during the session, then he spoke. He spoke very nicely on four topics of the three examples from the World View and Development session. He learned how to prevent minor disease at home from the hygiene TCD sessions. He said, “TCD training is very important for all people. So, I will go back to my village and I’ll try to tell my village people what I learned here.”

This month we arranged the Parents meeting and distributed school bags to pre-school children. All parents were present at the meeting. We shared with them many types of awareness lessons. 

Now, I will share the best student story of the pre-school: Durjoy is six years old. He studies in class one. He was very weak in studies compared to his age, and he didn’t know the Bangla and English alphabets because he was uninterested in going to school and studying. We noticed that when Durjoy started coming to preschool, he slowly improved and became interested in studying. Now he can say and recognize Bangla & English alphabets and count from 1-100 in Bangla and 1-50 in English. He can say different animals, fruits, and flowers names in Bangla and English. Now he is a regular and the best student of TCD Pre-School of Dadpur. His parents are very happy to see the changes in their son. They thanked TCD Pre-School.

During TCD meetings, we help villagers see the resources they have and think of creative solutions. We are excited to see what the village will decide to do next! In the 4th quarter, I plan to visit the villages of those who came for ToT training. We will go to their villages and form the TCD committees. We will help them to discover the village’s problems and will encourage them to solve them. We will follow up with them every week. In Dadpur Village, we want to help them to increase their income. We want to give two goats to each family as seed money.

Education is the backbone of the nation. In the preschool we have 16 children. Through the preschool they are getting a good education and preschool is the best preparation for primary school. They think that through the school their children will get a good education. Now their children have improved 80% through preschool. They hope in the future they will improve 100%.

Thank you!

Written by Imanual, GHNI National Field Leader