The change stories shared by adolescents were translated using Deepl, with no additional editing beyond translation.
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It all began on 18 February 2024 in that classroom of grade 9-7 at Antonio Lizarazo School in Palmira, where the classroom was full of disorder and rebellion among classmates, where the headmaster said that no one was beyond help or could be of any use, where there was total disorder wherever you looked, there was no trust among the students, no one trusted in the abilities of young people, and no one had respect for anyone else.
Until one day something happened. The VMC project arrived and gave the 9-7 students the opportunity to participate in a leadership course. With this course, they wanted to empower the teenagers to be leaders and help change their neighbourhoods. They provided us with training and knowledge about healthy cities, which began to bring about small changes in the behaviour of the 9-7 students. Little by little, the change in that group of students began to become evident. We no longer fought as much among ourselves, we began to be more united, we learned to work as a team and to be more respectful of each other and of the members of the community. For example, we began to collaborate with the boys from the neighbourhood to activate the Caimitos sports centre, when before we couldn’t even see each other because there was always fighting.
Not only did we make progress as a group, but they also made great progress as individuals, helping to achieve greater unity in the classroom and also helping to show a change in the community. We learned to improve the way we express ourselves, come up with better ideas and communicate better.
For us, this change is significant because we have new ways of relating to each other and to adults, as well as skills that we can continue to use at school with other classmates, with our families, and in the neighbourhood committee.
Long live Vivo Mi Calle!
