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Life Skills Curriculum - Drugs & Alcohol

What Are We Doing and Why?

Drugs and alcohol abuse ravage the social fabric of many upper, middle and lower class communities in South Africa. Whether you are talking about the wealthy white suburbs or the poor black townships, drugs and alcohol abuse is fast becoming a problem not only in the adult population, but most alarmingly, among the youth. Young kids are exposed to all forms of these addictive agents at a young age, and it is the age of our PfP participants that need to be made aware of the very serious implications of experimentation and abuse.

April and May 2004 marked the implementation of the Playing for Peace, South Africa Drugs & Alcohol awareness program. This peer mentorship program involves our Playing for Peace coaches educating their kids on the many important social issues they face every day. Playing for Peace, South Africa is using the sport of basketball as the vehicle to grab the attention of the youth involved in our program, and in turn provide them with valuable life skills information necessary to leading long and healthy lives.

What Makes Our Life Skills Program Different from Others?

What differentiates our program from others is that our coaches have now established strong relationships among the kids they work with outside the classroom. We have trained our coaches as mentors/ role models to their children. The information they are trained to present is done so through open discussion outside the confined classrooms that encourages participation and interaction. A bond of trust has been formed which allows our coaches to reach their kids where others programs do not.

Coaches Training

In late February 2004, the entire PfP staff was taken to Shongweni Dam for a 3-day retreat in preparation for the Drugs & Alcohol program. The weekend featured:

  • Facilitation training by the PfP Life Skills team for all coaches.
  • A Playing for Peace organizational background workshop hosted by our program directors.
  • Officer Daniel Verster of the South Africa Police Service, a trained lecturer on drugs & alcohol abuse and civic responsibility, hosted an informative workshop to raise awareness for the coaches.
  • A Life Skills team workshop to review in detail the Drugs & Alcohol manual and its newly implemented exercises.
  • A great chance for 2004 PfP staff to get to know one another and to participate in team building exercises.

Weekly support is provided for all the coaches by the Life Skills team. Coaches sit down with the LS team to go over upcoming sessions, discuss information that needs further explanation, and to lend general support and ideas for future training sessions.

What is the Current Status?

The Drugs/Alcohol curriculum has been presented to over 1400 kids from downtown Durban, Sydenam, Morningside, Glenwood and Montclair, Durban North, and the Umlazi Township in April and May 2004. The Playing for Peace manual was distributed as a guide for the coaches to follow during their sessions, which took place for over 1 hour before practice, once a week. Playing for Peace’s Drugs & Alcohol manual was created with valuable support and guidance from Zama Masondo of the SANCA Drugs & Alcohol Treatment Centre, and with the guidance of professor Steven Collings from the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban.

Measuring Our Success

  • Throughout the month of April and May 2004, the Life Skills team sat with coaches and conducted reviews to gain feedback on the Drugs & Alcohol program manual. Continuously, our coaches reported positive response from their learners during their sessions. Initially, in early April, the PfP learners fill out a detailed questionnaire presented in English and Zulu so as to determine their views and opinions about drugs and alcohol abuse. A second questionnaire was distributed during the final session at the end of May to be used as a comparison to determine how much of an effect our curriculum had on our learners. Life Skills co-ordinator Andrew Gordon and Steven Collings at the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban are now evaluating these questionnaires. Steven Collings will then collect a sample of these questionnaire’s and produce a detailed statistical analysis of his findings. We expect to have our results in the near future.
  • Life Skills Assessment Sheets were filled out by all 60 coaches after each of their mentor sessions. Carefully chosen questions helped the Life Skills team assess, on a weekly basis, the success and effectiveness of the Drugs & Alcohol awareness manual.

Goals

Playing for Peace, South Africa hopes to positively change the lives of each child in our program. We hope these children take the important information learned in our Drugs & Alcohol awareness program and use it to live informed and open-minded lives. We also hope that this opens the lines of communication in a society where silence is the norm. In the future, we look forward to assessing the program to make necessary changes or improvements so as to provide our learners with the most effective life skills training. All of our coaches and staff see the urgent importance of this taking place. There are endless opportunities for Playing for Peace, South Africa to expand to hundreds of schools waiting for assistance in the Kwa-Zulu Natal province and beyond.

Drugs & Alcohol Curriculum Partners:

  • Northeastern University Center for Sport in Society

    Many thanks go to Susan Leitao for her continuous support during the development of the Drugs & Alcohol awareness manual. The manual was written to stimulate discussions and further communication, and with the valuable hands-on exercises provided by Susan and her staff, our learners have shown us positive results.
  • SANCA Drugs & Alcohol Treatment Centre

    Many thanks go to Zama Masondo and Claire Savage for their continuous support and guidance. Zama helped support the Life Skills Kids Retreat to Shongweni Dam for our grade 6 learners in July 2003. She hosted mini workshops with the learners that gave them valuable drugs and alcohol abuse information. Zama has also lent her assistance and expertise at kids coaching clinics over the past year and with the creation of our manual and the questionnaire’s. We look forward to reviewing the questionnaire’s once we have collected them all.
  • University of KwaZulu Natal-Durban

    Dr. Steven Collings is head of the Psychology Department at the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban with a focus on HIV/AIDS awareness, race issues, and conflict resolution/ crime & violence. He has assisted our Life Skills team with the development and assessment for our HIV/AIDS awareness, Racism & Sexism, and Drugs & Alcohol awareness manuals. We have distributed and collected several thousand questionnaire’s to our children from Life Skills sessions beginning in April 2003 until present. Each time, we hope to find significant differences in what information these children had prior to our program compared to what they now have through these sessions. Dr. Collings has been providing statistical analyses in assessing our questionnaire results and also reviewing information gathered from mandatory notes taken by our coach’s and those coordinators facilitating the sessions.