Musing over coffee

The time had come for us to have a proper meeting to put all our ideas together and add the final touches to the proceedings. The team met up at Coffee Bean, Colombo to talk things over. One of the major issues we had was deciding on the design for the Hope for Kids t-shirts that we were planning on selling at the concert. Suraaj, one of our friends who specializes in design, had come up with various designs and all we had to do was pick the one we liked. Sounds easy doesn’t it? We ended up having a lengthy argument on which design looked better depending on what we believed the majority of potential buyers would look for. Finally we had a vote to settle the dispute diplomatically, allowing Chris to hand over the final design to the t-shirt printers, a friend of her father’s. Pri and Thish teamed off to write the script for the MC’s while Chris, Tara and I jotted down a list of everyone that had to be thanked and invited to attend the concert. This included our principal, headmistress, sponsors, Suraaj and Natalie.

T-shirt designs

Front

Back

Capturing the moment

There’re always times when you realize the value of having contacts and this was one of them. Chris’ former classmate’s elder sister is a freelance photographer and she agreed to take some photographs of the children for our publicity! After some complicating arrangements, we took Natalie, the photographer, over to the hospital. To our dismay, the door to the playroom was locked and we had no idea who had the key! Not wanting to waste our or Natalie’s time, we asked some of the kids to come down anyway and she managed to take some beautiful shots at the swings just outside. We had to ask Mr. Mohan to print them out but we felt so guilty about exploiting his kindness that we insisted that we’ll pay for these.

Nail art course: the basics

I’ve been using nail polish ever since I discovered it years ago but I never realized that there’s actually a standard way of applying it! Janindu, my teacher, started off with an even more basic beginning that I imagined, first demonstrating, with a plastic nail mounted on a stick, how to buff the nail, sanitize it with a spray, put on a base coat for protection (apparently nail polish contains nitroglycerine, a chemical used in explosives!), put on two layers of polish and finally the clear top coat for that final shine.

Didn’t draw anything but she taught me how to use an ‘orange stick’ which is basically just a splint that’s used to pick up small decorative objects such as beads. She demonstrated how to fix glitter, beads and stickers onto nails and then let me have a go too. Personally I found my first try a bit overdone...I guess I went overboard in my interest. Can’t wait to actually start painting though!

Posters all over Colombo!

Ms. Tanuja gave us some brilliant news! One of her friends, Mr. Mohan, who owns a printing firm, has very generously agreed to print out all poster and tickets for us. It was an offer we couldn’t possibly afford to decline especially since sponsors weren’t confirmed at this point. Now all we had to do was design the ticket and poster and send it over to him to get printed. We asked for 500 tickets in books of 25 and 80 posters. Since we were running out of time, we used the poster Dylan initially designed for the auditions to give us a head start. By this time, Ms. Dihara from the administration has managed to finalize our sponsorships so we were able to put in their logos as well. We had Mobitel as our main sponsor, who managed to cover our sound cost completely, and Yes FM, a radio station, as our media sponsor.

The posters arrived the following Saturday so Ms. Tanuja, Christina, Priyanka, Tara and I, aided with four participants from outside OSC who volunteered to help, met us that morning to go stick them up. Ms. Shameela, who is in charge of service activities, got us a van to transport us around Colombo. We first went to a nearby Go Kart place, which only opened at 4 in the afternoon, so we Pri and Tara agreed to go to Jungle Juice nearby while we headed off to Waters Edge. Ms. Tanuja, Chritina and I spoke to the manager and convinced her to not only stick up posters but also sell some tickets. Pleased with our achievements, we went to Odel, a popular store in Colombo, where we all split up to cover more ground. I stayed at Odel, Christina went to Budz, a restaurant nearby, Pri headed off to CoCo Verandah and Ms. Tanuja took the van with Tara to go to CR&FC grounds. Odel refused to sell tickets unless we let them earn a 10% profit from what they sell so we had to back out because we didn’t want to give away what we earned. However, we did manage to stick some posters up and Ms. Tanuja came back saying that we could also sell tickets the next day at Jazz, which is a monthly social gathering at CR&FC grounds.

Next we went to Galleface where the best hotels were, dropping off Pri and Tara at Barefoot and Christina at McDonalds. Ms. Tanuja and I went to Cinnamon Grand to ask if we could put some posters there and they agreed to, taking some away..we never saw them put them up though! Crescat is a shopping centre right next to the hotel, so we spent some time asking some shops to put the posters up while we were waiting for the others.

Thinking we’d done enough for the day, we headed back to school, having stayed out at least 2 hours more than we expected. Since the next day was Jazz, Chris managed to go and publicize the event handing out photocopied brochures with the help of some friends. From a stroke of luck, she bumped into a lady who worked for Sunday Time, a newspaper, who said she’d gladly publish online an article on our concert! Now that was certainly worth her time.

The article can be viewed at:

http://www.dailymirror.lk/entertainment/music/6471-fighting-cancer-with-music.html

Auditions at school…

After school started, we could now focus on getting more performers from OSC so group emails were sent out to everyone encouraging them to participate, giving them the details of the Cancer Hospital and what exactly the cause is for. The auditions were arranged for the second Monday and Tuesday into school at the auditorium. We also welcomed any non-OSC participants, who missed out on the first two auditions, to come in during these times as well. Some of the people who turned up were Sadini, who came again to practice her dance onstage, Amit and his band from Gateway school and the OSC band comprising of Brice, James and Maisoon. We had a few requests from other performers who couldn’t come on these dates to have another time arranged so we spontaneously had some informal auditions to suit them. They included Camille singing with Mr. Smith accompanying her on the guitar and the three girls Emily, Anna and Daisy singing ‘Hey Soul Sister’ with Daisy on the piano.

Although the whole purpose of the auditions were to eliminate people, it was nearly impossible to do so because they were all so talented! Emily, Anna and Daisy often kept losing confidence in themselves whenever they made a slight mistake, making faces at each other and making it extremely obvious that they had gone off pitch or forgotten the words. Aside from this, there were no major faults we could detect but we had wisely asked our music teacher to come along as well to give them more professional advice.

The list of participants is growing longer but we still had to get the sponsors finalized because, to our horror, sound was going to cost Rs. 60,000! Add along the printing cost of Rs. 20,000 for acquiring all the posters and tickets and we got ourselves a grand total of Rs. 80,000 as costs! Will this really be as efficient as we want it to be..?

Goals for this year..!

Creativity

Nail art course: I thought it'd be really interesting to try something completely new so I spontaneously signed up for a course in nail art. Let's see how it goes!

Action

Badminton: I have played badminton for five years in my previous school but did not continue it here last year because I chose the Yearbook elective. Now I signed up for badminton every Monday after school and am looking forward to playing again :)

Service and Creativity

Leader of the 'Hope for Kids' Cancer Hospital service group: We have our concert coming up and a lot of organising to do. We have a lot more members this year so it'll be more challenging as a leader to ensure everyone does their fair part of the work. After the concert, we'll also need to confirm what we're going to use the money for. We're hoping to visit the playroom once every Thursday after school to meet the kids although I doubt we'll have the time until after the concert.. Fingers crossed!

Summing up Grade 11

Now that it's time to start a new year, here's how I think I managed to achieve the Critical Learning Outcomes in Grade 11:

Creativity

My perseverance and commitment to playing the piano has allowed me to reach my goal of passing Grade 6 with merit which was more than what I hoped for. I gained an increased awareness of my ability to play under pressure although I still need to work on my sight reading which is an area for growth.

Performing in the dance the Sri Lankans organized for UN day, has increased my awareness of my ability to dance and allowed me to work collaboratively with others to put it all together. Despite letdowns and flaws, our commitment and perseverance resulted in a very successful performance that the audience thoroughly enjoyed!

Joining the Yearbook elective this year was a new challenge which helped me develop my photoshop skills as I have never used them seriously before. I had to work collaboratively with others, listening to and supplying criticism and working on the same page together with another member.

Action

Climbing to the top of Sigiriya has increased my awareness of my level of stamina and was able to reach the top without feeling to queasy about the height, unlike most other climbers! It also developed my understanding of my country’s history which I did not know in great detail before.

Starting to swim again enabled me to work on my areas for growth which included corrective my freestyle and backstrokes and working on my butterfly stroke which was a new skill that I developed.

Service

Tutoring a younger students mathematics for the first semester has made me more aware of my ability to teach comprehensively even though it is something I do informally on almost a daily basis with my younger brother and fellow students.

Becoming a member of ‘Hope for Kids’ Cancer Service Group allowed me to get engaged with an issue of global importance which made me more aware of the suffering that goes on in the world. Often we had to consider the ethical implications of our actions when it came to fundraising. For example, our principal had to remind us that it is morally wrong to have a bake sale for raise funds when there are so many malnourished children elsewhere.

Creativity and Service

I received my first taste of leadership during out Week Without Walls trip to Hambantota when I was made a sub-leader to be in charge of games due to my ability to converse in Sinhalese with the school children. I had to plan and initiate games that the children would enjoy and understand, for they would not be familiar with what we are used to, which required a lot of collaborative work. A part of this involved narrating a mute play performed by the rest of the group in front of the children and their parents which was a new challenge for me as I was not completely confident in my fluency of Sinhalese nor was I comfortable speaking in front of an audience though the experience did allow me to develop these skills.

I was given the opportunity to become a leader of the ‘Hope for Kids’ Cancer Hospital Service group at school. Having never been a leader for an extended period of time before, this was a completely new challenge for me which allowed me to exercise my leadership and organizing capabilities to the fullest extent. A major project that ‘Hope for Kids’ worked on was the fundraising concert which we initiated as a group. It required an immense amount of planning and creative thinking to reach to where it stands now at the beginning of Grade 12. It gave me an increased awareness of my ability to work collaboratively with fellow group members and others who were also involved such as the auditorium manager, security guards, school secretaries, sponsors and of course the performers. This experience has undoubtedly aided me to develop my communication and interactive skills although they are still areas for growth that I hope to work on next year. This project also let me raise awareness of childhood cancer to the Colombo community which is definitely an issue of global importance.