This service semester has been incredibly trying this year, an attempt to constantly find new project and ideas is exhausting. Also, we have gained a new service supervisor, Mr LeBlanc, and he’s been incredibly accommodating and so helpful when thinking of ways to keep our service time productive. We started the service semester working on yearbook blurbs and goals for what we would like our service to achieve.

We have been attempting to find ways in which we can kick start some projects in our online situation rather than sitting around and doing busy work. We began by emailing all of our older contacts, such as Mr Gamage from the Janoda foundation. We wanted to see if he had any possible projects for the orphanage that we worked at during WWW. Unfortunately, we didn’t end up getting an answer so we took to emailing other people in our contacts that we have done projects with before. One of the groups that we decided to email was Habitat for Humanity. We got the contact from Mr Lockwood and set up a zoom meeting during the Thursday of mock exams. Melissa Jayasuriya was who we had been getting in contact with and the zoom call ended up going very very well!!

We discussed possible ways that we could get involved in their brick by brick project. This project is based on building homes for low-income families in rural areas of Sri Lanka and aligns perfectly with the goals of our service. There were two ways that we could approach the project, either raising money for a fully built 1 bedroom and 1 bathroom house, or making the donations in integers. We decided that raising donations in integers would be more achievable as our situation makes it challenging to do bug scale events. Habitat for Humanity has worked with other schools around Sri Lanka such as St Thomases school and she had so many options for project ideas.  We are hoping to arrange another meeting with her to discuss our interest. Melissa also said that there was a possibility of making it a hands-on project once our COVID situation hopefully begins to improve.

I am so happy that Housing and Habitat have something to hopefully look forward to with this project! Planning these events will make our service session a lot more productive.