Over two weekends in March, the Justice and Peace Commission (JPC) of the Catholic Church in Guyana will hold a series of workshops aimed at providing expert training in the prevention of domestic violence.
According to an article in this weekend’s Catholic Standard, the workshops will be held over the weekend periods March 17 and 18 and March 24 and 25, from 9.30 am to 3.30 pm each day, and will be facilitated by Help & Shelter.
Initially, the training will target 30 persons primarily from Catholic parishes in regions 4 and 5. The newspaper said they will undergo the training as part of the overall goal of helping reduce the incidence of domestic violence in Guyana.
After they are trained, it is expected that they will conduct follow up sessions with ten to 20 persons in the various parish communities in the same two regions in order to train other people at the community level and to get the information out there.
Project Coordinator Nazla Williams told the Catholic Standard that the JPC had recognized the need for the Catholic Church to improve its ability to address the issue of domestic violence. She said that priests and other church personnel were increasingly being approached with domestic violence problems which in many instances they were not equipped to address competently.
The weekend workshops are billed for the St Paul’s Retreat Centre and the newspaper said that interested persons could contact Williams via email at nazlah_w@yahoo.com by February 29.
