Insightful — that’s the best way to describe how my previous week went. It was stressful and eventful. I hardly had time to sleep or have some work done in the house or even blog. In the end, it’s all worth it. All the life’s lessons I learned, all the crying and empathizing… all were worth it.

All those experiences, I learned from real life’s survivors — kids behind bars (mga bata sa likod ng rehas na bakal). They’re usually referred to as “children in conflict with the law” and they were our training participants for our course on values development.

Course or module designing is among my skills as a senior trainor. This time however, it took me days to finally put together a day-session for these kids. I had to do a lot of thinking and research to come up with the right design but that’s not all, our training team had to practice every activity ourselves in order for us to understand and feel how the kids would respond. Most of the kids were in their teens but only few of them managed to get secondary education, our modules were designed to cater to their comprehension level.

Prior the actual training, we visited their penitentiary several times to acquaint ourselves with them but did it in an unobtrusive manner. We observed that the kids have the tendency to be withdrawn and aloof. We readied ourselves with this reaction by making our preliminary sessions more interactive and fun so they would warm-up to us.

Lesson One. We greeted the kids with smiles and warmth that usually come from a good friend or a close kin. We were expecting they would just look at us or ignore us but to our surprise, they smiled back and responded very lively! One of them even honestly remarked: dito lang kami nakaranas na itratong tao, hindi kriminal (it is only here that we were treated like humans, not criminals). Every person wanted to be treated as equal, even kids already condemned not by law but by unlawful judgment.

From then on, the kids were very participative, except to a few who remained distant and aloof. These were the ones we learned were almost totally neglected, no visitors from family members for a long time. Their personality were toughened by hatred.

Lesson Two. As we went on with our journey with them, we learned very important insights: that all their misbehavior, troubles, and pains rooted from their homes. Indeed, values development starts in the family, it is a primary parenting responsibility. I remember one of our professors from my CPE class said: “if only parents would share their role in caring for and disciplining their children, teachers would be able to concentrate on what should be their primary task — teaching.” Instead, most of their time are devoted to mothering (includes disciplining and arbitrating, guidance and counseling, etc.) their students because of the neglect these kids experience in their own homes.

One of the youngest of the kids, a streetchild whom I would name Dante, was separated from his parents when he was still very young. In an activity where he was asked about the things that matters to him, he silently cried nonstop and was only managed to murmur these words: mahal ko si mama (I love my mama)… This young boy and all the others, though suffered terrible things in life and blame these to their family, still long in the end to be at peace with them and share a loving relationship. It’s ironic isn’t it? This made me believe more that the dearest person to your heart are also the ones who can cause you the most pain.
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