• Leader Resource 4, Hopeful People

• Print out Leader Resource 4 and cut up as shown.

This activity asks youth to assume roles and report on what a perfect and a rotten day would be like for their character. It will soon become clear that a perfect day for one can be a rotten day for another; a bad thing that happens to one person can be a good thing that happens to somebody else.

Give each youth a numbered paragraph from the leader resource. There are 17 roles. Most are in pairs; there is one set of three (1.a.-c.). Be sure to distribute both paragraphs from each pair you choose. If there are an odd number of participants, use the set of three. (You can use just two from this set, also.) If the group is larger than 17, ask up to that many volunteers to take a role.

Ask participants to read the paragraphs, but keep their new identities to themselves for the moment. Explain that you will want each of them to tell the group what a perfect and a rotten day would be for them. Say they can be as dramatic as they wish in their presentations and embellish the stories they have been given, as long as they keep the basic facts.

You can have each pair go together if you want. But it may be more interesting to let the youth present in random order, so it only gradually becomes apparent that a perfect day for any one of them will be a rotten day for somebody else.

When all have made their presentations, ask the group if they noticed anything about the activity. Allow comments. Then ask if, in real life, a bad thing which happens to one person might be a good thing for somebody else. In a world with 7,000,000,000,000 people, can everybody ever have a perfect day at the same time-even if nobody gets sick or has a terrible accident? When a bad thing happens to one person, does somebody else always benefit?