At the three-day seminar, which was organized by the non-governmental organization (NGO) Juventas at Ivan's River, 18 young people from six Montenegrin municipalities were educated as peer educators on the topics of healthy lifestyles, sexual and reproductive health and HIV prevention.
The coordinator of the Youth Program at NGO Juventas, Marija Stajović, said that the seminar is part of the project "Promotion of population counseling centers among young people in Montenegro", which started in June and will last for six months.
"We are in the second trimester of this project and we have the task of training high school students from six high schools in Montenegro from six different cities on the topic of healthy lifestyles and sexual and reproductive health," said Stajović.
She said that three high school students from three high schools and three vocational schools from Bar, Tivat, Podgorica, Nikšić, Bijelo Polje and Beran will attend the three-day seminar at Ivan's troughs, who will be peer educators.
"During this seminar, high school students will go through various trainings on healthy lifestyles, sexual and reproductive health. The lecturers are Juventas professionals, peer educators, psychologists and doctors. In addition, this seminar also has a segment on the promotion of population counseling centers for young people," explained Stajović.
In Montenegro, as she pointed out, there are 18 counseling centers for young people as part of health centers, where, as she stated, any young person can come without instructions and discuss topics that interest them with experts.
"During this project, we will also work on linking young people with counseling centers, so that young people come to counseling centers more often. Also, since these high school students will do peer education in their schools in all grades, we will do it with guests from the youth counseling center," said Stajović.
Scholarship holder of NGO Juventas, Jovan Dašić, said that the project implemented by that organization was created because young people in Montenegro are not familiar with the work of youth counseling centers.
"At the seminar, we talked about examples of good practice of counseling centers for young people in all health centers. "In particular, we found examples of good counseling practices in the health centers of Kotor, Tivat, Podgorica, Bijelo Polje, Berane and Andrijevica," said Dašić.
According to him, a five-day smoking cessation program is implemented in almost all counseling centers for young people.
"However, in the health centers that belong to those who have good practice, employees have expanded their programs and they talk about sexual and reproductive health, drug addiction prevention, risky behaviors, smoking prevention," Dašić pointed out.
As he stated, young people are most often interested in the topics of sexual and reproductive health.
"This topic is very poorly represented in most counseling centers for young people, which is why they use alternative methods to learn more about it, such as the Internet. The education system has provided for the subject Healthy Lifestyles, which is studied as an elective in most primary and secondary schools. ", Dasic said.
Faruk Husović, a second-year student at the School of Economics and Hospitality from Bar, said that until now he had not had the opportunity to learn about sexual and reproductive health at school.
"I learned a lot at this seminar and I hope to learn even more. Young people should be more informed about these topics through the education system. In one part of the seminar, we had to imagine our ideal sexual and reproductive health class. "One group imagined that this class exists at school and that it takes place twice a week," said Husović.
He believes that young people are mostly educated about sexual and reproductive health via the Internet, judging that this is not enough.
The project "Promotion of population counseling centers among young people in Montenegro" was supported by the Youth Directorate of the Ministry of Sports.
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