We were gearing up for the conferences. Nayara and I had received emails from some schools about donations, like Elizabeth Moir. However, our donation drive hadn’t garnered as much attention as we had hoped within the schools. This lack of response was possibly due to the absence of a service award for the school that donated the most this year, leading to most schools being less enthusiastic about donating.
Conference Day 1 (Raising Awareness) – Nevertheless, Nayara and I were determined to make this initiative successful, (as it was literally our responsibility as the head and deputy head of community service). On the first day of the conference, where formal attire was required, we decided to follow up with an email. We specifically targeted the OSC community, including the primary section and parents, as OSC was responsible for donating sanitary napkins. Our email resulted in setting up donation boxes in designated areas, and it helped raise awareness within the OSC community. Over the next few weeks, we managed to collect over 45 packs of sanitary napkins from the OSC community, significantly supporting our mission to help out the Nagamadu village schools which had significantly lacked necessities.
Once we had sent out the follow-up emails regarding our donation drive, we talked to the previous year’s “head of community service” as he had told us that there were lots of leftover books from last year’s book drive that he had conducted and so Nayara and I were sorting through those books to see if there were any books that we could donate to any of these schools, after searching nearly 30 boxes we had realized that most of the books were too advanced or damaged for them to be of any use to the school and so we had decided to not donate them.
After looking through the books we decided to talk to the Head of Security in order to organize drop-off points for donations that come from other schools and so after talking to Mr.Ajith, we set up different donation drop-off points so that other schools can drop their donations at any given time and it would be kept safely. We had also set up a temporary room for us to store all the donations we had received by talking to the head of the school.
Conference Day 2 (Working from home) – Since Nayara and I were head and deputy head of community service, we were not needed on the second day of service, as we were not debating and we did not have any service work to do. So we just stayed home (since it was a Saturday) and wrote a speech together as we had to give a speech on the final day of the conference in order to raise awareness for our community project. We sent follow-up emails to the 30 schools that participated in the conference to remind them about donations. I also emailed Mr. Russo to inquire about transportation. We needed transport from the school to take all the donations to the village in Puttalam. After exchanging a few emails with Mr. Russo, we were able to arrange transportation. The school agreed to provide us with a bus to transport all the donations and us to Puttalam.
Conference Day 3 (Speech time!) – Here we go, so the day started at around 7:30 am, well that was the time I was supposed to be there at the Taj to take EXCO photos but my tendency to arrive fashionably late (I overslept and totally forgot), led me to arrive there at 9:30 am. But not to worry as I did not miss my opportunity to take EXCO photos when I arrived there, Aura had told me that the time to take EXCO photos had changed so we were actually taking our photos at 1 pm (which we never took due to everyone being very busy) and so I decided to go back home at around 9 am because I HAD SOOO MUCH WORK DUE THE NEXT DAY. After finishing quite a bit of work I decided to come back to the Taj at around 1 pm with my laptop, therefore I can catch up with some work such as finishing my CAS blogs that I had due 😬.
Once I had arrived Nayara and I decided to run through our speech a few times and make small changes, as we had to present our speech in the closing ceremony which was later in the evening. After running through our speech a few times, I had some free time to spare so I decided to catch up on some of my work such as finishing up my biology lab report I had due the next day. Although I was used to public speaking, I was quite nervous for this speech as it was in front of 300 people and we had to convince all of them to donate to our cause. Although when the time finally came I think Nayara and I did a pretty good job. If you would like to look at our speech you can have a look at it here from 1:04:00 – 1:08:40. If you want to read through our speech you can also have a look at our script here.
Overall I enjoyed this experience and it taught me a lot about the difficulties of being part of COMUN and managing school, but overall it was a very unique experience to be a part of.
Although COMUN is officially over, our work starts now as we have to give all the donations we received to the school (CAS post coming soon!).
