The participants were trained by Nandor Lim and his wife Weny, who both came all the way from Malaysia. This was a commitment the wonderful couple gave as their support to the IOFC Pagadian Team, particularly the IGP Learning Community. With them, were Paul Fam and Ben Ang who came all the way from IOFC-AKASHA Learning Community in Malaysia to join this program. The learning process among the participants was tremendous and abrupt. The approach was subtle yet educational, restricted yet intellectual.

The 5 day period was tiring but it had its gratifications, as the participants were enthusiastic even up to the last minute of its commencement.

Upon the end of the training, responses of the participants were rationalized in this manner…

World café is one of the activities during IGP. Participants were asked to answer the questions related to the world. It depends on how each of us interpreted the question. Our answers could either be in the form of drawing figures or words. After giving our different interpretations and answers, we then have our group discussion about our answers and how we had come up to answers like that. And then, each group is asked to draw conclusion to generalize the group work.

The program (IGP), taught us to practice quiet time. We were created with two ears and one mouth, which means, to talk once and to listen twice. Quiet time is a time given to ourselves to listen to our inner voice and give time to reflect of the past and present situations we have had. After quiet time, everyone is asked to share the thoughts we had during quiet time.

At the inception of the program, the participants were taught on how to deal with the genogram and its relativity to the history of families.

Family is the basic structure of the community. It is where a person is molded first. The person’s disposition depends on how he or she is brought up by his or her family. A person who grows up in a happy and complete family will show a positive outlook in life but a person coming from a dysfunctional family will show negative disposition towards almost everything.

Everyone has different experiences with their family. Some have a complete but dysfunctional family, others have a broken one. Everybody has his own story to tell. Some stories may be sad, others could be happy but there are also those who pretend to be happy just to hide their real situation.

The genogram is one of the tools to helps us discover our family origin. It helps us to understand the present situation by tracing it back from our past.

We have learned that the person’s present personality is greatly affected by how he was brought up by his parents. Learning about our past helps us to discover both the visible and the non-visible sides. This was all brought up during the sensitivity training.

The sensitivity training has showed us the real emotions each one has been trying to keep to themselves, be it sadness, shame, guilt or anger each one has been hiding for a long time. It gave us the language of good communication. It helped us delve in deeper into our inner being. During the activity, some of us were crying because of the strength of the story’s impact.

As to the letter writing, it gave us more room in expressing our innermost thoughts , on how we really feel towards our present parent-child relationship.

As a child to our parents, we are told to write a letter for our parents. The activity had given us the rare chance to be ourselves, to be open and more lenient to the eccentricities and awkwardness of the world we are in. Different kinds of emotions were also being dealt with such as pain, shame, anger, hatred, avenging emotions and all that it entails. We are also asked to write letters responding to the child’s letter- our reply to the letter sent to the parents, not on the behalf of our parents but “us” being our parents. There, we have realized that it’s hard to respond to a letter from a child who’s expressing anger to parents.

Team building is one of the most enjoyable parts of the program, for everyone was tasked to participate in order for the entire group to succeed in solving the puzzle games.

We also had our film viewing entitled “Pay It Forward”. We were so inspired by the movie. The reason why we watched the movie is its close relevance to what we learned during the sessions. While we were watching the movie, some of us cried because we were inspired by the boy-actor named Trevor. We can’t imagine that an 11 year old child have initiated a movement towards change. A simple move which made a big impact to the world, Trevor has proven to us that change starts from within ourselves. And that change doesn’t have any age requirement. The ending part really touched us because Trevor, during his 12th birthday died because of helping his friend from brat boys in school and he died with the thought that to “pay it forward” didn’t apply to his life. But, the truth is, it triggered everyone to do the same things Trevor had done. In our real life situation, if only everyone will do what Trevor has done, then we will create a new world in harmonious unison.

The IGP-TtT has brought us to the point of realization that each one of us has to show our “TRUE SELF”. Maybe as of now, we are still struggling to find our true self, but we must not put everything in a hurry. Everything can wait. It’s a process. To re-discover ourselves, to heal our inner wound that we’ve been ignoring for so long and to forgive. The aforementioned core of our feelings can wait.

After this training, we still want to continue this fellowship and help this prosper, only for the reason of enlightening more our minds the way IGP have done for each of us. We know that the first step is always the most difficult, but together, we shall have the courage to do so.

Our warmest thanks to Kuya Nandor and ate Weny for spending their time with us from day 1 till the end of the program. They’ve opened our eyes, gave us a variety of options, and the most that they have done is to bring us back into the human race. And at this point in time, we want to open the lives of people other than us the same way they did by continuing this program. Mabuhay IGP-IOFC Pagadian Team!!!! Another successful activity was made…

BY: the IGP Batch 2 Family, IofC Philippines

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