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!

Hope for Kids- First insights

I think cancer is one of those terrible things that always seem to happen to other people but never to me or to people close to me. I’ve never experienced the pain cancer patients and their families must go through on a daily basis merely just to accept the fact that an incurable disease is gradually shutting down the patient’s organs…and there’s seems to be nothing anyone could do to help. But I could try. I could try to encourage kids with cancer and their parents that there’s still hope…this life is worth living. I’m not surprised that I immediately knew that, out of all the service options offered at OSC, the Hope for Kids cancer project would be the most personally gratifying for me.

In our first meeting I learnt that this project has already achieved a considerable amount of tasks. During the past few years, students from our school had raised enough money to build a play house (a whole floor!) at the hospital and are even sponsoring a teacher to encourage the kids to make use of the facilities offered there. We learnt that we’ll be visiting the hospital every other Thursday so we would need to decide what kinds of activities we would like do with them so we came up with:

• Making stencils during meeting and giving them to the kids to paint
• Origami!!
• Playing instruments (keyboard, guitar..) to entertain them
• Organising a drama for children’s day/Christmas

Well…thinking of what to do with the kids isn’t enough! We needed to come up with effective fund raisers to bring our budget back up to its normal limit (a huge chunk of it had been used up last year). What they had done before was printing out calendars, which was a huge success, but they could do nothing with the ones they couldn’t sell- 2008 calendars weren’t very popular in 2009! We brainstormed and the results are as follows..:

• A bake sale at school (we’ll have to make the food)
• Printing t-shirts with pictures of celebrities who had cancer on the front
• A hope for kids walk

Not bad for the first meeting huh? =)

Smiles and tears

Our orientation trip to Kalutara did a lot more than just making us bond with each other and form new friendships; that was what I naively thought it was for. Among all the activities the one that stood out the most for me was our first hand experience of CAS when we were taken to the home for disabled kids, The Mama Papa Home. It certainly was the most emotional.
We were greeted with the cheery, innocent smiles of the kids all geared up and ready to start drawing with us. Skillfully maneuvering around the obstacle of communication problems, each of us managed to interact with the kids in our own unique way, resorting to sign language and trying to speak Sinhala when necessary.
They seemed perfectly content to me but as I followed one of them out of this bubble of happiness into their living quarters..I was appalled. The stench was unbearable. Flies hovered around each head of these helpless, severely disabled individuals who were too unfit to come and join the drawing. There were no mattresses..they had no control over their excretory system so just urinated when they had to. One of the women in charge, who were paid next to nothing for their services, would drag the shriveled body away to clean inside. As I watched the flies crawling along the lips of a child who glanced up at me with bleary eyes, I promised myself to come back and do something to help every one of them. Taking the hand of the boy I had followed, I walked out into a field to where the others were playing their games..

My CAS Objectives 2009-2010

Creativity

1.Yearbook - start improving my photoshop skills
2.Piano - work on sight reading; pass grade 6 pracitcal and theory exams!!
3.Dance - learn social dancing..?




Action


1.Swimming - start making use of the Otters Club Membership I have and actually start swimming there!
2.Badminton - practise the skills I've learnt over the past 5 years; stay after school once a week to play with friends



Service

1.Hope for Kids (Cancer Hospital) - joined the school's cancer service project; help organise fund raisers and play an active role in making the hospital environment more tolerable for both the kids and their parents.
2.Mama Papa Home for disabled kids - find a sponsor and/or raise funds with friends and family to make the home more hygienic and comfortable for the kids
3.Tuition - help a younger student with his/her maths work after school