Introduction to RCCI:

Rehabilitation Center for the Communication Impaired (RCCI) is the service that I am currently in. RCCI is a service that works with the communication impaired in Sri Lanka (LO6). Before the COVID-19 pandemic, we meet with the RCCI group every Thursday to play games and have an overall good time with them. Activities would include dancing, playing the gym, art work, and watching movies. Our service group brings joy into their already difficult lives. Our service group aims to communicate and help with their disabilities. This is difficult as the severity of their disability ranges from person to person. Others may have very mild disabilities and may be high functioning while others may need a lot of support. Each person in RCCI has a different story and disability which makes it amazing to see how much they’ve all overcome. This is my second year in RCCI so I have become familiar with what each person’s interests are. Some like football while others like to dance. Our service aims to communicate with the RCCI group and bring as much joy as we can into their lives.

Zoom Call Planning

COVID-19 has taken a great toll on our service group as we rely heavily on face to face interaction with the RCCI group. Since the school has shutdown and the RCCI group can’t visit us, we had to resort to online Zoom calls for our Thursday service sessions. Right now its just the advisor and other members in the call as we aren’t able to have Zoom calls with the RCCI group. We use these Thursday sessions to plan for future sessions once we can go face to face with the group back at school (LO3). These sessions are spent working collaboratively with the other members (LO4) to create a detailed schedule for when we return to face to face. In this schedule we list each day and the activity we are going to do that day. For example, one day we can be doing an art project while another day we can be in the gym dancing and playing football. Within this schedule we also include specific materials we need for each day and facilities. This schedule hopes to make the service much more enjoyable for the RCCI group. Along with making a schedule, we discussed future long-term projects to raise awareness about RCCI. One long-term that we will be undertaking is the making of a podcast to go over the things we did in our service over the course of a semester. This podcast will start whenever we return back to school with the RCCI group which will hopefully be next semester.

Reflection

Overall our service sessions were a success. We were very productive in our calls and we got our work done. Given the current circumstances, we have accomplished a lot as we have done good planning for once we return to face to face. There wasn’t much else that we could have done as our service depends on face to face. These online sessions have proved to be beneficial as we are now better prepared going forward. We have a lot of new ideas that can make this service even better. However, these ideas can only implemented if we are face to face. So looking to the future, if we are not able to return back to school then we will try and hold Zoom meetings once in a while with the actual RCCI group so we have some kind of contact with them. With our current situation, our online Zoom calls have been very beneficial to our service group and now we are ready and eager to return to face to face.