Do you know that there’s a particular day in the year that is the most important?
Are you aware that on this day, people spend a lot to celebrate it? For many reasons, people like you can easily slip into the idea that without enough food, roses, music and money, you can’t celebrate it in an excellent way. That’s not completely true.
That most important day is BIRTHDAYS.
Every day in the year is a remembrance by someone somewhere thankful for another 1 year of life. Actually, birthdays are pretty good. Though the celebration shouldn’t be just about the number of age, but about the quality of your life, the lives you have touched, the relationships, renewed hope, wins, the struggle, lessons, and challenges.
In this post, we want to share with you how Prikkle Academy did an experiment to celebrate 2 amazing people on their birthday, with just 200 Naira (= half of $ 1).
Our team has been learning and dishing out an approach called Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) through in Nigeria since January 2016, to empower people to use what they have (their personal gifts, their community resources etc) to create the solutions they desire, rather than complain about what they lack.
One of our team members, Opoola Grace, celebrated her birthday on the 23rd of October, 2016. Also, one of our participants, Abdullateef Islamiyat celebrated her birthday on August 19th. We were not sure what to do on both days. We know that to surprise them, we will have to set up a stage, buy some super gigantic cake, rent a venue and bring loads of gifts. We will have to break the bank to make this possible. Smiles…
We decided to try a simpler and inexpensive way. All we did was to buy 1 pack of Biscuit. What we did with it is where all the magic played out.
For Opoola Grace, we divided well-wishers into 4 groups. Each group was given just 2 pieces of the biscuits. They were given a very simple instruction;
- Use the 2 biscuits to create a something (word, symbols, drawing, etc) that will mean a lot to the celebrant.
- Get this to happen in the next 3 minutes.
- When done, one member of the group will explain how they arrived at a conclusion, and what message they wanted to pass to the celebrant.
At the end of 3 minutes, these amazing pictures below were what we saw;
For Islamiyat, it was an individual task. Each participant had just 1 biscuit to work to work with. They were given the instruction below:
- Use the biscuit in your hand to design something that will blow the mind of the celebrant.
- Get this done in 5 minutes
- When done, the celebrant will go around decoding what each individual is trying to express.
At the end of the 5 minutes, these are the wonders that we saw;
*Pictures got corrupted, we are working on restoring it …on the way*
The celebrants couldn’t believe their eyes; they were plucked off their socks and swept off their feet with these creative possibilities, they couldn’t have celebrated a birthday as memorable as this.
We took out 5 major lessons that are useful in development and creating happiness from this birthday bash;
- Celebrating the gifts, skills and ingenuity of people will make them create things that never thought possible. They will surprise themselves.
- Little is much. Thinking of what you have as small and therefore, refuse to share it with other will make is smaller instead of make it larger.
- You can create happiness and trigger collaboration among any age range in a community using fun and in a relaxed atmosphere.
- People are naturally creative and they can solve their own problems with or without any external help – help other possibilities in them emerge.
- Making a difference doesn’t need to cost arm and legs or breaking the bank. Personal or national growth doesn’t require huge external funding, only experts and professional, but internal resources and homegrown solutions.
Keep in touch, in the form below for other creative ways we are exploring to empower individuals and communities to translate their gifts and education into social solutions.
Prikkle Academy …inspiring community builders.
