Conquering Sigiriya!!

I have been attending international schools in Sri Lanka for nearly eight years of my school life which resulted in me not being exposed to as much of my country’s remarkable history as I would have liked. This Christmas holiday, I challenged myself to climb to the highest point of the rock Sigiriya, a world heritage site atop which the palace of Sri Lanka’s ancient kings once stood. I once attempted it a couple of years ago but couldn’t brace myself to make it to the very top so I had to settle with going up two-thirds of the way.

What made the experience all the more memorable was that it wasn’t merely just physical exertion: it was an exposure to the ancient history of Sri Lanka that remains in the ruins of the majestic palace and its gardens. What amazed me was the complexity of the architecture that was used over 1500 years ago when it was first built to serve as a fortress for King Kashyapa. Two moats surrounded the perimeter of the site although only the inner one was still filled with water. I had to pass the boulder, water and terrace gardens to get to one of the entrances to the rock (there were three: the Lion entrance, the Snake entrance, the Elephant entrance). What I found fascinating was that there were rocks that were naturally shaped like a snake and an elephant that graced their respective entrances!

And then the climb began! Surprisingly I managed to spring up the steps without much difficulty (it was nowhere near as hard as I remembered!) and the view was magnificent with the forest spread out as far as I could see with a Buddha monument rising above the canopy. On the way up, I was able to admire the mirror wall, on which some ancient writing could still be seen, and the marble staircases that are said to be visible at night as they shine in the moonlight. The most nerve-wracking part of the climb was trying to make my way up the rickety spiral staircase to get to the famed frescoes, or at least what remains of them.

When I reached the lion’s paw terrace, which was where I stopped on my first climb, I was more than willing to take the final and most difficult steps to the top. Although the sight of the sheer drop straight underneath was enough to make most of the other visitors rather uneasy, I managed to make it with no panic attacks! All that remains of the palace are simply two bricks…everything else has eroded away. I somehow anticipated something much more spectacular but I wasn’t disappointed because I made it! The climb down went quite smoothly so I was back on the ground in no time, exhausted but a lot more aware of how proud I should be of Sri Lanka’s history.

Hope for Kids - Summary of next few visits

Exercising creativity

We visited the hospital once every alternate week which isn’t that often but we used the time productively, getting to know some of the kids better by doing simple drawing activities with them. Unfortunately we were not allowed to have any games that involved physical exertion since they are not fit enough so our options were very limited. Of course we didn’t let that stand in our way! The kids seemed to be very fond of drawing but we wanted to make the interactive sessions more interesting and less monotonous.

On one of our visits, the teacher in charge drew some pictures of turtles on cardboard which we got the kids to colour in. We then taught them how to cut a slit through part of the shell and staple it so that it’s shaped like a cone. They were overjoyed, especially when I got them to press the stapler down!

A similar activity was cutting out strips of paper, handing them out to each of the kids to decorate and stapling them together to make a paper chain. We hung them on the doorway for all to admire.

Change of plans

What we wanted do to raise money was to have a bake sale at school and we were all very enthusiastic about it as we sat at one of our meetings planning. However when we informed our principal, Mr Coles, of our plans he joined us, insisting that we should brew up a more creative means of collecting money. Since there’re plenty of children in Sri Lanka who are underweight, it didn’t seem right to sell sweet food to the OSC students who would eat them just for the sake of eating. Refusing to be disheartened, we soon came up with alternative ideas: using the kids drawings to make postcards was one and we thought of making wrist bands with a Hope for Kids logo (which we have to come with!).

A lil bit of sunshine

The next time we visited we were eagerly looking out for possible post-card-material drawings and we made a very fascinating observation: most of the kids’ drawings involved the sun. Although many children draw suns, we thought this would be perfect for our logo as it symbolises happiness and hope. We scanned in our favorite drawings and edited them during our meeting to get them ready to send to the printers.

Sparkly clean J

Just outside the playroom, there’s an enclosed space with plastic toys such as cars and rocking horses that are too large to be placed with the smaller toys inside. One of our visits was dedicated to clean this space entirely for a considerable amount of filth has accumulated on them. Equipped with our arsenal of rubber gloves, brooms, mops, disinfectants and dustpans we scrubbed every surface within our reach until we had cleaned the area the best we could to make it safer for the kids to use.

Christmas surprises!

All too soon, we were faced with the last visit for the semester and we were determined to make it as special as possible. We all played our part: balloons were brought in to add in some festive cheer, gift packs for each of the kids (comprising of a drawing book, pencils and an eraser), funky cardboard sunglasses and to top it all off…our Bio teacher dressed up as Santa! The van ride was spent cutting up the sunglasses for the kids to colour and blowing up balloons. We gave one out to ever kid we saw but unfortunately there weren’t enough of them so some had to be disappointed. However, no one went away empty-handed because Santa made sure everyone got a gift pack. We put on some music to create a brighter atmosphere and busied away with last minute cardboard sunglasses as our departure time came nearer. It was our most difficult yet most successful session we’ve had: some kids didn’t get a balloon and even started crying but it was obvious that everyone was happy at the end of the day. Reassuring the kids that we’ll be back soon with more balloons next year, we closed this year’s last Hope for Kids chapter and waved goodbye.

Yearbook Semester 1

We had our last Yearbook meeting for the semester last week and I’ve worked on three divider pages (sports, PYP and teachers) with Kashish and Sasha. The first two went quite smoothly even though Kashish was quite fussy about the sports page and kept on changing it until we convinced him it looked great!
We made use of different websites that I haven’t even heard of before, like dafont.com, as well as school events photos for the teachers page. THAT was the page I had the most trouble with because my initial plan of writing “Teachers” on a chalkboard with chalky writing along with some doodles to represent each subject (i.e.: 7^2=49 for maths) did not come out exactly as I planned. One lesson Kashish and I drew this on a white board with the intention of photographing it and editing it of Photoshop but that didn’t work either. So I finally thought of cropping out pictures of teachers and putting them around the writing “Teachers”. However I couldn’t finish it because the computers blacked out while I was in the middle of the session!
The main reason we couldn’t get that many pages done this semester was because we only have time for electives once every alternate week which really isn’t enough for to get sufficient work done. We stayed after school once to catch up but hopefully more elective time will be allocated next year.

Lankan Dancing on UN day!

Rehearsal Havoc!

If you know nothing about baila songs let me tell you this: the task of choreographing a dance to such a song is IMMENSE! The whole concept is to allow the music to guide you, allowing you to move freely but we tried that on our first rehearsal and...it didn't turn out to be very successful. Most of us were unsure of what to do so felt uncomfortable improvising dance steps onstage. Our dress rehearsal was nowhere near impressive simply because the majority of the dancers did not have the confidence they needed to move freely.

Rehearsal Havoc!

If you know nothing about baila songs let me tell you this: the task of choreographing a dance to such a song is IMMENSE! The whole concept is to allow the music to guide you, allowing you to move freely but we tried that on our first rehearsal and...it didn't turn out to be very successful. Most of us were unsure of what to do so felt uncomfortable improvising dance steps onstage. Our dress rehearsal was nowhere near impressive simply because the majority of the dancers did not have the confidence they needed to move freely.

Putting it all together...:)

After realising how much trouble we were in if we didn't improve drastically we decided to call in some professional help. So one of the dancers called in two of her dad's friends who were much more experienced than we are and they were placed in charge of redrafting our dance steps: and they did an EXCELLENT job! We preplanned all our steps, giving ourselves more confidence as a result, so we were able to perform better on the actual day.

It's all over..phew!

The Sri Lankan performance had to go on stage first which was quite nerve wracking, especially with the girls worrying about the possibility of their saris falling off while they're dancing! Miraculously, we were disaster-free on that final performance resulting in a successful, hilarious and enjoyable start for the show.

UN day
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Hope for kids-Very first day at the hospital!!

The playroom is not as gloomy as I thought it would be: it’s actually quite bright and has an extremely ‘playful’ atmosphere! Hardly any of the kids came down from the wards on the first day and the few who did just read a few books but didn’t really interact with us much. The main objective was to look around in order to familiarise ourselves with the surrounding and try to come with anything extra we can do to iimprove the quality of the room. A few we thought of were:
•Buying cloth for curtains and getting the kids to finger paint on them- that’d be a fun activity!
•Bringing in some Sinhala/Tamil children’s songs to play while the kids work on their crafts.
•Organise the stray DVD’s and books- they’re everywhere!!
Not even the 30 minute van ride back to school was wasted! We planned the bakesale and decided what kind of food we will be selling (brownies!ice cream!). Since we wanted our own labour to go into the production, we decided to bake the products ourselves (hope mine will be edible!).

What’s a root???

Tutoring a 7^th grader maths really did help me uncover a buried talent…I can TEACH!! I never thought I had it in me but we had two successful lessons so far and the only problem I had was trying to help her with a sum her teacher gave her that required the Pythagoras theorem (which she obviously hasn’t done before since she didn’t even know what a square root is!). I’ve always helped others with their work before, including my younger brother, but this is the first time I’ve done it formally so it has given me quite a lot of confidence of what I’m capable of when it comes to teaching. Kiyana (the girl I’m tutoring) and I meet every Tuesday after school in the library for 45 minutes or until we get kicked out…!

Using Photoshop for something productive! Finally!!

Yearbook is my elective for the whole of the grade 11 year and I’m determined to make use of it to fine-tune the photo editing skills I learnt two years ago but never really got the chance to practice them seriously. Our first meeting comprised of an introduction of what Yearbook is all about, including the amount of dedication each member will have to show in order to meet deadlines! Since this is my first year at OSC, I was totally clueless as to what this school’s community expects from a yearbook- a lot, I found out soon enough… I went through a couple of the school’s former yearbooks and was captivated by the amount of work that went into each page to make every one of them as individualistic as possible. We were all assigned specific tasks by our group leader and I volunteered to be in charge of divider pages. Let’s see how this works out!