Last year I joined OSC during a time of calamity and chaos as COVID had just struck the nation and it vastly affected my schooling experience. One of the first things which I did when I joined OSC was sign up for a service group. The service group which I joined was Housing and Habitat. This service focused on the Sustainable Development Goal of “Industry, innovation and infrastructure”. Housing and Habitat is a student led organization which is affiliated with the Janoda Foundation in Hambantota and organize builds with them.

Housing and Habitat have two main fundraisers which are the making of Home Run as their primary fundraiser and then conducting bake sales over the course of the school year. Unfortunately, I joined during a really complicated time because of COVID and DLP essentially messed up this whole process as we were unable to conduct the Home RUN! and the bake sales.

During my first every session which was coincidentally the only face to face session we were able to have, we decided that we would plan for the annual Home Run.  As I was new to the service I was first given a quick briefing on what it was and then set to work on planning. We decided that we would use the same route for the Home Run which had been used the year before. We worked a lot on planning on ways to raise awareness for Home Run such as by creating posters which included QR codes which in turn went straight to the Housing and Habitat website.

Even though I was unable to contribute as much to Housing and Habitat as much as I would have liked, I was still able to learn a lot from the few face to face and virtual meetings that we had. I learnt valuable skills such as how to work together in a group, how to organize and plan events and how to reflect on everything that you have learnt during an experience. I enjoyed it a lot and hope that this year that the situation is better and that we are able to function properly without any restraints.