A therapeutic Learning Enviroment

The opportunity to learn practical and vocational skills and thus potentially earn a livelihood provides a clear reason for the girls to attend the centre. However, LEC is essentially a therapeutic learning community, where much emphasis is placed on various self-development tools. These include participation in group discussions, diary-writing, and expression through various art forms on a regular basis. The regular group discussions provide the girls with the crucial space needed to think for themselves, to reflect and hear other diverse views, to widen their perspectives, and to share and to analyse . The emphasis is on examining our own current existing attitudes on societal and cultural norms and see for ourselves, how much we are contributing to the problem and giving us the opportunity to decide what is possible for us to do to change the situation.

The whole process of socialization and development of skills takes at least 2 years for most of the students and we encourage families not to stop this process abruptly. In our experience it takes a minimum of these 2 years to start re-building on their lost self-esteem, confidence and belief in themselves when they have been abruptly forced to drop-out of their normal education.