It’s been a minute since my last service update (more like 9 months ago, but that’s irrelevant), but that’s because we were busy making amazing progress with our service group, SOS Village!! Over the last year, we were able to fundraise, restructure, organize, and advocate for this amazing service group at our school.

 

First of all, I have to bring up our slight miscalculation of judgment last year (lets keep that between us) For around six months, we were trying to collect goggles from people in the school community because we noticed that most of the children in SOS always wanted to borrow some from the school when they went swimming. Because of this, we came up with a plan to put posters around the school and place a box in the student center to collect goggles to then donate to the children. However, after around 6 months we only had around 5 goggles (4 of them being from people inside our own service group). This strategy definitely was not working, and we may have overestimated how enthusiastic our community would be. And so, as service leaders, we had to make a change in the way we were approaching this. This is where Stephie and I while talking to our teacher coordinator, figured out we should do a fundraiser in order to raise funds and just buy brand new goggles for the kids instead. This idea came to life in the form of selling chocolate chip cookies and hot chocolate (specifically hot chocolate because it was the Christmas season). Our plan was formed, and we made all the necessary steps in order to not only sell cookies but make them with the SOS children on a Thursday afternoon and then sell them on Friday so that they were also involved in the process. Unfortunately, they couldn’t make it because of transport issues so we had to bake them on our own.

However, this plan all came together in just one week, and it was quite hectic and chaotic at the beginning, but as service leaders, we pulled through and made it work. Thankfully, everyone brought their assigned ingredients and utensils, we were smart enough to book the design room kitchen in advance, and no one caught on fire from the oven, so I would call it a success. The next day at lunchtime, we set up our booth in front of the field and it went (basically) smoothly. It was a success and we raised quite a lot of money for our fundraising.  Additionally, another service at our school, “Gecko Gear”, helped us tremendously by offering to get all the kids new swimming bags with goggles and a swim towel as well. This went really well and all the kids had fun with their own goggles at the pool. The money that we made from fundraising went to funding the snacks and drinks that we offered the children at the end of each session. All in all, this worked out really well, and a big thank you to all that made it happen especially Gecko Gear!

 

 

Now, as we continued each week, we found that we had a few complications. 1) we were always planning what we were doing last minute (sometimes minutes before the kids arrived, if I’m being brutally honest) every Thursday for their session. However, we learned that this was probably not the most organized way of doing things, and it was always very chaotic with some last-minute scrambling. 2) Each child in SOS was at completely different levels of English learning, which meant that some activities were way too hard for some learners, and way too easy for others. So, as the service leaders we got together for a meeting with our teacher coordinator and we made a plan. We came up with a reading plan, at the beginning of each session we would each read to our buddies according to their own specific reading level, with different levels of books ranging from beginner to intermediate to expert. We acquired the Scholastic books “First Little Readers”, which came in three different levels and were color-coded and stored separately, so we could easily access them when we needed to. This helped create a much more structured learning plan, and we were able to make use of our time with our buddies. Then, depending on the weather, we would either stay inside and complete a different interactive activity, or go to the pool and swim. We tried making the pool more interactive as well, such as playing icebreakers with the balls in the pool and just hanging out with our buddies to create deeper connections with them. Although this was a little hard and sometimes chaotic due to the language barriers, with some effort we were able to transfer some of the learning we did in the classroom into the pool. And we really do try to make an effort, because the pool time is one activity that the children always look forward to, and they are ecstatic when they have this ability to do something that we take for granted. Considering their living conditions, they don’t have any access to facilities such as a pool, so I am honored and proud that we could provide these kids with this experience.

 

Another service event that came up was the annual end-of-the-year service assembly. During this assembly, services could celebrate their achievements over the year, as well as inform other prospective students about why they should join their service. As service leader, I was one of the people who was able to advocate for our (amazing!) service group. After planning what we were going to say and creating a slide, we had a very successful presentation to the school highlighting our successes throughout the year.

Overall, this year was a very busy and successful year for our service. Planning ahead, we hope to create even more organized and impactful sessions that allow us to create an environment for these amazing kids to learn and thrive, whilst still having fun and making connections with our community.