After the first day or working and helping at the school, I'm exhausted. The day started with us playing Duck Duck Goose with the children, and I immediately found the challenge of the language barrier. Since a large chunk of the class doesn't speak the native language, we dealt with it by having some people go off and start planning the maintenance, and others, me included, demonstrated physically how to play the game as the Sinhalese speakers explained.
I'm actually quite proud of our mural of the underwater scene. We had to consider what to put on the wall, as we needed to include the previous school's, ASD's, elephants that had already been painted, and we needed to cover their signatures. We came up with water and a whale, starfish, octopus, seaweed, fish, and a turtle. As a team, those of us who specifically worked on the ocean mural worked really well together. We planned ahead with the sequence of painting various areas. We started with the main chunk of ocean, then sketched the animals out in chalk. We started painting the animals individually and separately, but realized it went a lot faster if Yanika painted the base color and then Zahara and I did the details and beautification of the animals. One of the main difficulties we faced was when we started working on details and had to use different brushes that we shared with the maintenance crew painting inside. We overcame and even benefitted with this challenge because we ended up using 1 large brush, 2 small brushes, then used our fingers for things like outlines.
By the end of the day we were exhausted, but cleaning up was necessary and an important part of the day. I ended up with Kavindra and Nikhita and we cleaned all the brushed and buckets and rollers in paint remover/turpentine. I think I really showed perseverance in this because a lot of people were just standing around because they were so tired, but I actually got going, finished the job, and completed the day. It is also, quite blatantly obviously, an absolutely annoying and often painful process to clean all the stuff in chemicals that burn skin, leaves surfaces sticky and dyes everything it touches.
By the time we got back to the hotel I wasn't feeling so good, so while we were reflecting I went up to Ms. Lenk who proceeded to hit me on the forehead a couple times and deemed I had a fever. The last part of the day was spent rehearsing our songs for the performance we had on the final day at the school. We chose the to sing Stand by Me as a group. I think that it's a good song, and very meaningful, but I believe we could have chosen a better song that the children could possibly enjoy more, or that they could understand or that was interactive (like Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes). I simply left midway since we were a disjointed and distracted group and I already had everything I needed to know since previous research had been done on the lyrics of the song to memorize them.
I'm proud of the fact we managed to paint all the underwater part in one day and now we just need to finalize the details and paint the upper background/sky.
No comments:
Post a Comment