Activities week

Activities week is a specialised week where residents are able to step outside of the intensive therapy and to break away and have some fun. The week is designed to build team spirit, to build trust in one another and to really just bring the community together.

It teaches residents that there is a life of fun to be had outside of addiction and that one doesn’t need substances to let loose and to enjoy social activities. From war cries to talent shows, from individual challenges to team work challenges this week pushes the social development of the residents.

Residents are divided into teams and engage in healthy competitiveness. We have minute-to-win-it activities, quizzes, board games, amazing race, boeresport, party games (no not the drinking ones), sports day, talents show, debates and more. It is a fun, action packed, week.

26 April 2020

Written by Megan Lowes

Jahara just came off the back of an Activities Week, everything from musical chairs, pin the tail on the donkey, The Amazing Race to football tournaments. This week pushed the residents beyond their boundaries and out of their comfort zones into spaces of vulnerability that are not easy to access. Human beings in general, but addicts in particular, tend to build up their lives by staying in spaces where they can succeed. We choose ways of living, people, careers, cultures of addiction, identities that help us play small, that keep us under the radar where we believe we are safe. The stands. We stay out of the arena, we avoid the fight, and we tell ourselves it’s self-preservation. It’s coping. It’s life. But recovery isn’t found in the stands- recovery is found in the arena. And nothing pushes an addict into the arena more than interacting with people who see the world differently to the way they do, who solve problems in different ways, who struggle to speak up and share ideas, to step back and not control. This is the power of Activities Week. The implementation of soft skills that most of us have never been taught, the skills that are the most valuable but the least understood. And once we start to learn about them, we learn that they are anything but soft. They are the building blocks for healthy, functioning people. 

We live in a world that rewards radical control, that sees vulnerability as weakness. A world where leaders are insensitive and demanding, ego-driven and critical- but at least they get the job done, right? A world that doesn’t listen, doesn’t see. A world where most addicts don’t feel like they fit in. But true leadership, true power, lies in our ability to hear others. Because if we can’t hear other people, can we ever really see them? Addiction is a disease of perception, and for far too long every resident has defined their world based on these perceptions.

What Jahara offers is multiple approaches to ways of breaking apart these flawed perceptions, the unlearning of thought patterns and behaviours that no longer serve us in recovery- the ability to start to accept life and people as they are and not as we would have them. Activities Week is one of these ways. Strategically placing residents in groups with people they don’t normally interact with challenges them to have to deal with different personalities and find ways to work together in order to complete the tasks. These tasks improve soft skills such as collaboration, adaptability, creativity, brainstorming, conflict-management, communicating feedback in healthy ways, taking responsibility for decisions and following through with them- and sometimes losing anyway.

Frustrations run high and competitiveness kicks in, and suddenly there is no time for masks. The walls that the residents have built around themselves and their fears and their pain are shaken, and they suddenly need to let them go in order to progress any further. There’s a surrender that happens- a letting go of the things they can’t control, an acceptance of the people around them whom they previously couldn’t tolerate. And in this we start to see an acceptance for themselves- an acceptance of the character defects they have been using to cope for most of their lives, an acceptance of the people they have become as a result of their addiction, an acceptance of how their behaviours affect people around them.

What we’re really starting to see is change, healing- the resistance slows, there’s more listening and less talking, there’s an awareness that I am a part of a world so much bigger than me. And the residents become teachable, they find the courage to redefine themselves and to ask more questions. They face fears of being rejected, they face fears that they are not enough, that they have nothing to offer. And they become a valued member of a team that encourages and builds them up and helps them to fight the darkness that tells them they just can’t do it. And they overcome. They learn to dare to fail, and to step into that space regardless. These are the skills that can’t be taught in booklets or lectures. These are the skills that come from rumbling with another human being, of fighting for genuine connection and not just validation. These are the skills that save lives. And in its humble and playful way, a talent show that threatens every flawed belief an addict has about themselves, suddenly has the power to set them free.