Hope for Kids: Cancer Hospital: First Trip

On my first trip for Hope for Kids we only got to spend about an hour at the hospital, still it gave me a good introduction to the individual Service program. For some reason the first thing that really struck me was that we had to remove our shoes before entering the building. I felt this was partly due to the cultural respect, and partially to keep the germs and dirt away from the kids. When we walked into the building I immediately realized that I could return to this place to help out. As we split into groups, I was partnered with Ian and we were assigned with cleaning the common area with the toys such as bikes and toy cars. While some people might feel this was demeaning to have to clean while others got to play with the kids, I feel like this is almost as important because, while the kids need fun interaction, the area also needs to be clean to make sure their already weakened immune systems don't catch anything else.
Ian and I collaboratively came up with the plan to divide up the area of the floor into three and move the equipment that Ian needed to clean in to the middle so I could sweep around it and under the tables at the edges of the room. After that we moved the equipment back, swept the middle of the floor, and then let our perfectionist sides take over. We definitely showed commitment in cleaning the entire area and we both know that an area of strength for us is our perfectionistic tendency to want whatever we start to be finished to the highest level (mainly when it comes to cleaning). We managed to completely clean the entire floor of the room and all the toys/equipment in it in an hour by working collaboratively together.

Overall, I'm really happy with my participation in this Service project and am looking forward to continuing.

Hope for Kids: Cancer Hospital

For my Service requirement for the IB program I recently signed up for a group activity organized by the school, which is the Hope for Kids: Cancer Hospital. While I am still continuing with my own individual Service outside of school, I needed to join in Service in school to keep up the commitment of hours required. I chose the Cancer Hospital because it is an issue close to my heart since almost all the females in my family are genetically predisposed to having cancer. I also chose it because I know cancer is an issue of global importance yet deals closely with every individual who has had to suffer because of it's affects. At the same time, I can work collaboratively with others, both my own classmates, the staff at the hospital, and the kids who have to be there; however, due to the circumstances that we interact in, I must consider the ethical implications of all my actions since it's a very different environment and therefore interactions must be dictated by the situation at the present moment. I also know that every day I go to the hospital I have to plan new activities with the kids because I'm interacting with a human being whose mood changes and I have to plan and initiate new activities to whatever they want and whatever mood they are in that day. I also know this will be a new challenge for me to undertake because I generally haven't worked closely with children before, so it will be a new learning experience where I develop new skills, and at the same time, as I interact every visit, I will develop more awareness of my own areas of strength and areas that I can grow on.

Reflection on Day 2 of Week Without Walls

Famous last words. Today's painting was borderline excruciating. The day started hard enough since we were all tired from yesterday's work, but we showed perseverance by putting on a smile and going and helping the children. When we got to the school the language barrier was there again, however, since we found that we had the time limit of working until 2 PM, we decided to the leave the Sinhalese speakers and extremely patient individuals with the children to play games while most of the maintenance and mural people went off to work.

Our first issue occurred when an individual, in our now very small group dedicated specifically to our mural, decided to repaint and redo the details of a couple of the main animals. Looking back at it now, even they say it was a bad use of the time. This took them about an hour and a half of time we really needed to focus on other issues with the mural.

The next two issues are not related, though they were both relatively major at the time, and do slightly influence each other; the first being that before lunch it was just me, Kavindra and Zahara, and after lunch it was just me and Zahara, the second being that there wasn't enough blue paint to cover the entire sky in one color of blue. The first challenge was actually slightly beneficial because we had space to work around each other and also get to know each other better despite the fact we were rushed for time with so few people to do so much.

As the afternoon started and progressed, the difficulties became almost comedy-like. Right after lunch we had Bryce come and work with the tall roller and paint the higher places that were still out of our reach and beneath the sign. Suffice to say we basically took a shower in blue paint sprinkles. However, this teamwork showed that we could work collaboratively together, since we both had to stand on a wooden table to reach everything we needed to on the wall, we then had to work around each other doing different tasks in similar spaces at the same time. The real difficulties started when Bryce was called back to the maintenance team and another guy, he-who-shall-not-be-named, came in to help. He-who-shall-not-be-named then proceeded to paint past the border of the sign we said to stop at, then after we tried to clarify what went wrong and clear any communication issues, he painted up to the roof on one side as well, so we couldn't make it even without painting the entire upper wall as the sky. I'm not using this as a place to rant. But I was, and still am, annoyed.

To make matters even tenser we were almost completely out of the blue paint we had been using to paint the sky with and the top area of the one side he had been painting was sketchily done and still needed to be gone over. Even though Zahara and I were both pissed off, we knew we still needed to regard and respect his feelings so we gently told him we could handle it from there. After he left we then proceeded to panic. We knew we had to think of a good plan that would actually work with the meager amount of time and materials we had left before we actually started anything. We came up with several plans but the one we decided upon was to paint the top of the wall a slightly different blue we had a bit more paint in, then blend the two colors together with water. It worked well even though it was time consuming and it was just me and Zahara working at this point. The blending actually ended up looking very good and almost intentional.

When we finally finished the sky we then had to deal with the sign saying the name of the school. It would have been blatantly disrespectful to leave the pale green, white and orange of the sign with blue paint splatters and drips  on it. However, even after we roped Onkar into helping us we still had the challenge of being unable to reach the highest parts of the sign. So we came up with a solution that wasn't particularly safe, but it worked, and by this time in the afternoon we were desperate. We put a wood bench on top of the wood table we already had there and then held it while Onkar stood on it and painted.

I feel very proud of the mural we completed for the school because we faced many challenges and overcame them, and we also created a beautiful piece of art for them to enjoy and draw attention to the school with.

During the performances the language barrier was almost painfully obvious because they couldn't understand, and therefore really comprehend and appreciate, the lyrics to the song Stand by Me, though they could appreciate the effort we put into it. Also, we couldn't understand any of the performances they really put effort into presenting for us. Still, it was their thought that counted.

After the performance I got really pissed off because, again, it was only me, Kavindra and Nikhita cleaning everything paint related. I believe that it is important that we clean up after ourselves since it's not our school and we should be respectful of their space. I also felt like I showed true commitment when, once again, I was washing stuff in burning chemicals, killing braincells, and was sticky to touch for the rest of the day until my shower because of the turpentine.

In the end, I'm really glad that we managed to help out with the school, finish the mural, and improve the lives of the children and families hurt by the tsunami. But I was also glad when we got back to the hotel and I got to take a 45 minute shower to get all the paint and turpentine off.

A picture of the finished mural. Unfortunately you can't see the bottom part of the mural, but it gives you a good idea of what the product was. What you can't see in the picture is the Octopus in the lower right hand corner, the seaweed across the bottom, the crab in the middle, the second and part of the first fish, and the two starfish. So actually you can't see a large part of it.

Reflection on Day 1 of Week Without Walls

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.

Goals for Week Without Walls

• Plan and initiate activities (this can include creating new games with the kids, starting setting up or cleaning up, planning time saving ways to paint the walls, etc.).
• Be creative (again, it can be any way, creativity is in the approach and execution of a task).
• Interact collaboratively with others in a way that benefits (this includes being able to make the kids smile and be happy, helping make the teachers lives easier, and working well with my classmates so we can work productively).
• Be respectful to individuals and the environment we're in (there are cultural differences, gender differences, etc. we need to be respectful of this, as it's not our environment).
• Have fun (self-explanatory).
• Help the children and make sure they're comfortable (they don't know us and we're a group of strangers turning up and working at their school, we should at least try to make them comfortable around us as we work there to improve their school).
• Help throughout the whole trip. No laziness, show perseverance (the school needs to be worked on just as much at the end of the second day as it does at the beginning of the first day).

The picture below shows the the Primary Schools in the area of Hambantota, OSC's grade 11 helped out at school 2 and school 3.

Photos from SAISA

 Team Huddle

 Playing as a team

 Going for it...not the most flattering photo. But it shows the game.

Team encouragement on court

Volleyball SAISA

Volleyball was a wonderful action activity that really allowed me to bond and work collaboratively with the other girls on the team. It also allowed me to work on understanding my areas of strength and areas that I need to work on. I realize from volleyball that I’m much more committed to an activity when others need and demand me to be there and I then show perseverance and commitment because these people push me on and because I enjoy the physical work and overall experience more when I have a team to work with. I also understand that I need to grow in my knowledge of how far I can push myself without bad consequences and how I can be stronger then I think, but only if I get rid of my own mental barriers telling me I can’t. Outside of volleyball I began planning and initiating my own fitness regimes that would increase my playing ability for the Libero position. To achieve this I often used my equipment for my aerial silks, which I already had, and modified to the meet the present needs; by doing this I developed new skills on both the aerial silks and in volleyball.

During SAISA I hosted two girls from the Bombay/Chennai School, Maja and Chaeli, and played throughout the tournament as Libero. Overall the tournament was great fun as we got to meet new people and learn about new places and the way other people lived their lives. It was also fun because everyone had a love for volleyball there and we could all bond over this similarity together. There were definite moments where tensions had to be worked out, but overall the teams worked really well with each other. As a team we also had to initiate some new activities as we accommodated the extreme increase of people. We often ended up warming up, cooling down, and doing skill work on the field, which allowed others to use the gym. Overall the SAISA was a tremendous success and we, as a team and as individuals, all feel very proud of what we accomplished. It was really nice for all of us to be able to see our perseverance and commitment pay off, and we all enjoyed working as a team as well.