These titles get progressively worse, but I think I am starting to like them. If it wasn’t clear, this is a long overdue service update.

This year, I was stepping into my third year in Room to Read and my third year as a service leader. As we continue to work with the Vidyaloka school, we have been workshopping a myriad of new ideas for our English teaching programme that capture the essence of what our goals are with the students, embedding them in our culture at OSC as well as engaging them in the educational material we provide to make learning fun. Our first order of business as service leaders has been to train the newcomer service members in Room to Read, getting them acquainted with the teaching programme and our second-hand bookstore. We have also continued the programme, which has been progressing extremely well as we try to come up with new ways to engage the students. These past couple of weeks, we have tried to incorporate technology into the learning process by doing a ‘movie night’ segment of our service time to watch videos that allow the students to engage actively with the language.

We have also moved forward with a pen-pal project with the help of our former service leader, Luka Traveller, who recently moved to Slovenia and is actively engaged in his service work there. He approached me with the idea of doing a cultural exchange style virtual pen-pal interaction as a means to expose the students in Slovenia to a new and deeply interesting culture while doing the same for the Vidyaloka students as well as serving as an outlet for the students to show off their new English skills. Along with the help of the service members, our Vidyaloka students have created short videos in groups where they briefly talk about their interests, family life, and life in Sri Lanka while also asking questions about life in Slovenia. Though this was a time-consuming project since the requirements of DP 2 have gotten in the way (mocks 😔), we have finally completed the videos, which we plan to share with the students in Slovenia and will eagerly wait for their responses to see what life on the other side of the world looks like! I am immensely proud of not only the Vidyaloka students for their growth and comfort in speaking English but also of the younger members of RtR who have taken charge of making progress when we older service members did not have as much time to devote to the classes. Overall, the progress of the English teaching programme has been very promising, and it is very rewarding to see how our hard work is paying off by making the Vidyaloka students more proficient and also giving them a change of environment.