A Rotary Vocational Training Team (VTT) is a group of professionals who travel internationally to share their expertise and improve the lives of others. A recent VTT team traveled from Rotary District 5330 to District 4630 in Maringa, Brazil.
On their only full day off, the District 5330 VTT members visited Iguazu Falls.
This program, said District Governor Judy Zulfiqar, who was part of the team, was built out of Past District Governor Jamie Zinn’s focus on mental health awareness. The team also included Carissa Gerry, Maryalice Alberg Owings and Jennifer Loretta – who shared their experience on Zoom with the Mountain Sunrise Rotary Club – and Glen Brock and Dan Hudec. PDG Ricardo Loretta was the coordinator of the team.
“We have gone back to the same district for a couple of reasons,” PDG Ricardo said. “It’s safe, they know what they’re doing and, when we work with them, we know our team will have an excellent experience and the results will be solid.”
VTT groups had visited District 4630 in 2015 and again in 2019, focusing on education and community service.
This VTT learned about the current initiatives the Maringa community has in place to address mental health issues. They offered training to several universities in the Maringa community on the newly developed District 5330 resilience training program, which aims to help youth develop skills that will improve their resilience both individually and in group settings.
Skills they identified as being significant to resilience include optimism, confidence, adaptability or flexibility, trust, support, ease with others, tolerance and quick recovery.
With one group, the VTT members broke them into small groups and assigned them a skill. They had to develop a skit demonstrating that skill; the others had to guess what skill it was.
The VTT also did an activity that asked the question, what do we have in common with each other? The Brazilians were asked to stand up if they agreed with a question asked and stay seated if they disagreed. Questions might be, “Are you the oldest sibling?” “Are you a morning person?” “Have you ever broken a bone?” “Are you sometimes depressed?” “Do you know someone who has committed suicide?”
“People could look around and see others who feel the same as they do,” Jennifer Loretta said. Following the questions, they would have a discussion, asking if they learned something new about the others in the room and if it made them feel like they had more in common with other people.
What did District’s 5330 VTT learn? “We learned that Brazil is experiencing similar mental health concerns to us,” Zulfiqar said, “especially after Covid. The universities we visited expressed concerns about the students coming back into the college environment. They are having anxiety, depression.
“The community,” she added, “is interested in the resiliency program and are looking at adopting some of the program we presented to them. Some are already implementing some of the elements.”
There is big interest, Zulfiqar noted, in continuing a dialogue between the two districts.
The VTT members visited four Rotary clubs while in southern Brazil. And they also were able to make time for some extracurricular activities; they toured a distillery and a vineyard. And they had the opportunity to go to Iguazu Falls, the biggest waterfalls in the world where Brazil and Argentina come together.
On their final day in Brazil, the VTT met with the Maringa Chamber of Commerce and local officials to discuss the current state of mental health in the community and the initiatives that exist to address the community’s growing needs.
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