On January 20th, me and 12 other students, along with two teachers; Mr. Rossberg and Ms. Fleming, went on a trip to Hambantota to help out the Janoda Foundation and their preschool. We arrived in the afternoon, and met the young children that were at the preschool. We all loved them and everyone got along well considering the language barrier.

Our goal was to help the young kids, and help create a fun activity in their environment. The first night, we all came together and took on different responsibilities. People volunteered for different tasks; for example some volunteered to help create train tracks for the kids to play around on; others volunteered to paint a fun flower wall along with walls that were painted in previous years. A peer and I were in charge of painting the mural, which was very fun as I was able to use creativity skills and also communication skills to make sure that the wall turned out well. It was a difficult process as it was very hot, and the grass was tall, and we had to stand on a very wobbly ladder; but with determination, we were able to finish it up.

Our daily routine was always very busy, we would wake up very early, have a delicious home made breakfast and go straight to teaching the preschool kids in the morning. As a group, we established that in the mornings, they were very active and preffered to move around rather than sit down in class. We sang songs, played games outside and went on the swings. Once this tired them a bit; we split up into our groups. Previously, when we were in Colombo we were assigned teaching groups, and each group had to plan out different games/classes with the kids to do over the 3 days of teaching. My group decided to start off with name tags making, which they really enjoyed because we brought stickers, and glitter which made it more fun and welcoming. This was challenging and eye opening; it is difficult to gain the attention of a young child for more than 10 minutes at a time, and the classes we planned should’ve definitely been more engaging. Once we all finished teaching in the mornings, we spent the rest of the morning, and the afternoon working on the train track: digging, painting, and more digging, as well as painting the mural. This was a very tiring part of the day that all of us had to do, we tried keeping each other motivated, and taking turns so we wouldn’t get too tired. Once we had finished this part of the day, we washed up, and had some time to hangout. This trip also helped me gain new friendships with other grades, which was really fun for me to interact with other people than the ones in my grade.

 

On our last few days, we had finished the train tracks and teaching the students, so we went onto a trip to a pottery place where we tried our traditional clay pot making where we manually spin the wheel.

This was a very fun experience, we were able to meet a family that owned the pottery barn where they made beautiful bowls. We then left to stay at Shangri-La Hambantota. We spent one morning doing a beach clean up, around 20 minutes away from the hotel; where we filled tons of huge trash bags with beach trash. This made us feel great, as we knew we helped out the community and cleaned up a very big area that was polluted.

In general, this trip was really eye opening for me, and I am sure for everyone else that it did too. We were able to see how other communities were living, and had the opportunity to help them and create something for them that they would enjoy.