Auroville youth and peer education

Juan Andrés was born in Chile to parents who were psychologists. He began studying medicine because he wanted to understand the body as well as the mind. However, he was disappointed by the prevailing medical paradigm and eventually dropped out of medical school. But while there he started working with the International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations (IFMSA) which dealt with topics like public health, medical education, sexual and reproductive health, human rights and refugees.

The Standing Committee on Reproductive Health including HIV/AIDS (SCORA) of the IFMSA organized trainings for its members by the Y-PEER organization, which had been set up by the United Nations Population Fund to encourage peer education regarding sexual issues, reproductive health and use and abuse of drugs. Juan Andrés was enthusiastic about the approach and subsequently became an advanced Y-PEER trainer and the focal point of Y-PEER in Chile.

Meanwhile, he began studying psychology. After graduating, he worked for some years as a psychologist in the Chilean Institute of Integrative Psychotherapy (ICPSI) before deciding to leave Chile and travel with his former partner to Asia. Last year, they arrived in Auroville to stay.

Auroville Today: Why did you decide to leave Chile?

Juan Andrés: The approach of the ICPSI was refreshing because we were trying to see what psychological approach worked best for different cases and for different situations, but I realised that the support I could give to my patients was limited because they were subject to so many social, political and economic factors that I had no control over. We had to work too much with coping mechanisms; I felt like I was just putting on patches rather than doing the real work.

Also, my work with Y-PEER in Chile didn’t progress because there is no concept of peer education in my country: the approach is too top-down, paternalistic.

My partner at that time and I shared many idealistic approaches, we were trying to live sustainably and were on a spiritual path, so we decided we wanted to try to live somewhere else less limited by the social, political and economic context of Chile.

None of our plans had included Auroville. We travelled first to Southeast Asia but felt overwhelmed by the material unconsciousness and began considering India. However, we did not feel ready for the raw India, so we looked for a place that was a safer bubble, and Auroville appeared on our screens.

We didn’t know anything about Sri Aurobindo or The Mother but on my first day here I went to an exhibition on the first floor of the Visitors Center where there were images illustrating quotes of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. I could not believe what I was reading: it was like getting to know my own unknown spiritual wisdom. After that, I thought this place really is something and I wanted to find out more.

How did you come to use your Y-PEER expertise in Auroville?

After started to work in Santé as a psychotherapist, I began hearing parents’ and teachers’ concerns about teenagers who had sexual issues, drug issues, psychological issues etc. I felt their distress and a certain hopelessness. They were saying they had no clue about what to do with the kids because they felt so distant from them.

We were wondering how Santé could help but then it struck me that the Y-PEER methodology could work, although I couldn’t be certain as I didn’t yet know enough about the social context here. So I went to YouthLink, who warmly welcomed me and the idea and they referred me to people who were already working with teenagers. When I explained the Peer Education concept to them, I got very positive feedback.

I decided to go for it. I found somebody with some experience who could co-facilitate with me and we started trying to apply this methodology Aurovilian-style.

Why are some Auroville teenagers having these “problems”?

It is very special for them to be brought up with these ideals and vision but I think kids here have a hard time accurately recognising and describing their feelings. Actually, I don’t think this is just confined to the teenagers. Adults also find it very hard to talk about their feelings because I think this attempt of going directly into the spiritual path may be somehow bypassing the self, so people don’t necessarily deal consciously with their feelings and emotions.

So while Auroville’s ideals are calling us to push our boundaries, there is a need for assistance in working with the vital and the mental elements of the being: I don’t think everybody can just jump into the supramental.

These kids understand the vision but they also have a very high sensitivity to what is going on around them, so they see how far the adults can fall short of the ideals. In their eyes this can be hypocrisy, so they may get frustrated and rebel.

The first element in the rebellion could be saying “I cannot trust these people, so I’m not putting myself out there”. They can become introverted. If they feel they cannot share their feelings, it can be much harder to process their emotions and they may not know how to deal with themselves: this is the pressure cooker they can have inside them. This could take different forms of expression, like issues in relating to others or drug abuse, but these are all just symptoms of a less conscious state that lacks integration.

I learned that even a few years ago the older kids would watch over the younger kids but in the last few years the age groups apparently became very segregated: now teenagers only mingle with people of their own age. So everybody is on the same level, and if the only people they can go to are their peers who have the same level of ignorance and lack of resources, they might receive a lot of misguided advice which may put them in potentially damaging situations.

How can Y-PEER help?

The idea is to empower young people to help each other and to assume positive leadership roles in their peer group. This is particularly important when there is a general distrust of adult advice, or when adults tend not to know what to do with the youth, as is the case in Auroville. These Peer Education trainings allow young people to convey important information to each other in a much simpler way than having to spend years learning content. You can spend just a few weeks or months learning through trainings and your practice as a Peer Educator how to do it in a contextualised and empathetic way, opening spaces to go deeper through developing trust.

Y-PEER trainings give essentially a methodology. It helps people understand an effective way to deliver information in order to create motivation and change behaviour by connecting with the resources available. Information, motivation, behaviour, resources: these are the ‘four pillars’. This approach can be applied to several different situations but it is most often associated with aspects of sexual and reproductive health and rights, life skills, drugs use and abuse and psychosocial issues like discrimination or bullying.

What training do the young people receive?

APEN has done two Peer Education trainings in Auroville so far, involving about 40 people from the ages of 16 to 35 from diverse cultures and backgrounds, including that of the bioregion. Y-PEER has developed training manuals but we have adapted some of the exercises to the Auroville context by using situations that would be familiar for young people here. I complement the discussions and insights with my psychology background.

Attendees go through three levels of development. Firstly, there is the individual level in which they reflect upon themselves. The trainings’ techniques and safe space allow them to reassess their identity, attitudes and value system and to define their mission in becoming a peer educator.

Once they are comfortable enough with their identity and the life skills they are acquiring, they can feel more prepared to explore the social level. They learn to identify and understand situations like bullying or detecting use of words or communication styles that can be discriminatory or emotionally damaging, and begin to see that they can do something about them. They can team up with other peer educators to organise themselves at a party and just be there on the lookout, or try to have a conversations with people when they see behaviour that might negatively impact others. This requires skills and gets better with practice. One of the very basic tools they learn is active listening, acknowledgement and being supportive rather than pushing people into doing what you want them to do or think is right. They also learn to use non-moralistic language and to deliver information in a way that is empathetic and related to the specific context.

The third level is the structural one. When they are feeling confident enough about the other two levels, they can start creating and delivering education sessions for their peers using the four pillars we talked about. They need to know what information they are going to give, which motivation they want to trigger, the attitudes they want to foster and how to connect with the available resources. They need to approach this is in a very contextual way by assessing their target audience and understanding cultural and age particularities, etc. They should also be clear about what they are doing this for, what would be the expected outcome, and be able to design the best methods to achieve this. One of the strongest techniques we practice is theatre-based peer education, but they are free to invent and add others, a process that is overseen and supported by the whole network.

This is because you need a certain level of confidence to be able to design and deliver peer education sessions, which is why we do the trainings and hold monthly progress meetings with all peer educators to assess where they are at all three levels. The support factor is crucial, which is why the network aspect of the APEN is so important.

As a result of the team building and deep sharing, the trust level among the participants in each APET is quite high. For most of them, they are opening up much more than they’ve ever opened up before in their lives and, for sure, everybody has gone beyond their individual comfort zones.

Is the assumption that most of the young people’s problems can be solved on a peer-to-peer basis?

Not necessarily. If you are experiencing more peer-related issues, like discrimination or bullying, where the first intervention is more needed from peers, you may dilute most of the “problem” by having social interventions from peer educators: this can tackle the root of several issues. But if, for example, you’re already experiencing deeper psychological distress, it would be preferable to come and see me, for example, because as a psychotherapist I have knowledge and resources in the field that your peers do not have access to. In this sense, being able to trust an adult again, when they may have not felt really supported by adults in the past, can be a huge relief and very healing for them. Actually, peer education serves more as a preventive strategy and for early detection of issues.

But doesn’t peer education challenge the traditional assumption that adults are the source of wisdom and guidance for the young? And may this not create conflict with the traditional ‘authorities’?

The difference is that we are dealing with topics that nobody else is talking about, taboo topics that usually parents won’t even talk about, like sexuality, drugs and gender roles, so we’re not taking anybody’s role away; we are just taking a role that is vacant.

But it is true that peer education does challenge certain traditional attitudes. For example, we try to be non-moralistic, context-based, and to avoid the dualism of ‘this is good, this is bad’. Instead, we emphasise that everybody is an individual and has a right to choose what kind of life they wish to lead. We stand for people being respected, and we do not accept that there is just one version of how to lead one’s life, with a checklist that you have to satisfy or else you are an outcaste. Nevertheless a critical element is how to approach these choices and issues; and we aim for the most conscious, contextual, integrative and compassionate way possible by developing life skills that enable this.

Do parents have any role in facilitating this process?

I think the first thing they can do is to really get to know their children. But if these youngsters don’t see a genuine opening, a feeling they are accepted in a non-judgmental way, the parents are not going to get to know them. If parents get to know a little bit more about their children’s mindset, their values and ways of seeing the world, they will realise how different they are from them, and the assumption that ‘my children are just like I was, I have gathered experience so they should listen to my wisdom’ will no longer hold. This is all about parents and other adults acquiring humility, about realizing that what is right for them may not be right for someone else. The truths we discover are our own treasures. The moment we try to generalise them, to make one size fit all, it’s not accepting the diversity of humanity.

Although there are dangers in generalising, what do you see as the major differences between the perspective and outlook of the Auroville youth of today and those of their parents?

I think the youth have a very different outlook because the different generations are subject to very different influences. Their parents, many of whom were early Aurovilians, had a big vision for the future, a big goal, and were willing to put up with a long and bumpy road to get there but the youth of today are focussed much more on the present. I think the big goals are not getting that much attention from the youth now, they want to deal with the urgent things in front of them. So long-term things like what they want to do with their lives, whether or not they want a family, or whether they want to stay here for good or settle down elsewhere, do not really bother them.

What I’ve seen so far is they want to be of service, and they are practical rather than ‘abstract and aspirational’. Their attitude is ‘Don’t give me the big words, show me where it is manifested’.

In other words, it’s as if the generations are speaking a different language. It’s like the older Aurovilians are speaking Chinese while the youth are speaking German; this is why the disconnection happens. And I don’t think this attitude of youth is peculiar to Auroville: it applies to youth in other parts of the world, too.

Do you see Y-PEER as part of a much larger grassroots movement, one based upon the empowering idea that there are tools that anybody can learn and use and this is not dependent upon one’s age or qualification or status?

Yes, for me this new way of education is completely connected with this kind of empowerment. It is also about focussing on what we have around us and what we want to do about it now because of the urgency of the situation, rather than having a very long-term plan. Everything is changing, moving so much faster now, so the need for a fast and adaptive response is ‘on the skin’, engrained, in every young person.