Today we are very excited to post an article by our soft skills teacher and Community Centre Manager Jyoti. Up to now, we never actually published anything written by one of our teachers.We hope that you find it very interesting to read, and this is something that we plan on doing in the future.

Trust is a base from which you build confidence. Having Trust in yourself and then in others is very important for the growth of a person.The ‘Trust walk’ is one of the most important lessons of our Youth Empowerment Program (YEP).The objective of the YEP is to build the capacities of the youth from Dharavi so that they will be able to face the challenges of life with confidence, rejoin their studies, or find better career opportunities for themselves, and the ‘Trust Walk’ lesson plays a vital part in this.

The activity was conducted on 24th August 2013 with 30 students at a park called ‘Five Gardens’ in Dadar, Mumbai. The students were divided into pairs where one was blindfolded and other wasn’t. Then we made them walk around the park crossing many obstacles on the way; going under the slide, walking down the steps, standing on the roundabout and much more. The rule was that the lead partner had to keep their partner safe but was not allowed to guide them verbally. When the activity was over, the same activity was repeated but the blindfold was switched.

The students liked the place and enjoyed the activity. When they had finished we came together as a class and they shared their experiences about when they were blindfolded.

Some of the things we discussed were:

• Were they comfortable when blindfolded?
• Whether they had trust in their partner that he/she would take care of them
• Whom do they trust in their personal life?
• Why do they trust that person?
• When they were in a pair with the opposite sex, how did they feel?
• Why is having trust in people important?

Trust is very important for the growth of a person.

Things which are important to build trust include; knowing the person very well, confidence that the person will always be there to support, will never ditch, will maintain confidentiality, will protect each other, will never take advantage of each other.

When you trust someone and he/she does something which is disrespectful to you, you should be able to say ‘No’ and stop that person.

Men and women can be friends but there should be border which they should not cross.

The points highlighted after the discussion were:

The activity was very popular and very useful to understand the concept of trust and to understand the importance of it. At the end students were told to try and build trust among themselves, keeping in mind all the things which are needed to develop trust. We are sure that the activity will definitely help in developing good relationships among students and help them in future
scenarios.