Feature image taken by Kenji Tan.
The Hope for Kids service group focuses on the very delicate topic of children who have been diagnosed with cancer. Every week our team travels to the cancer hospital to help bring a sense joy, or as we like to call it, hope, to these children whose lives may at times seem so despairing. Our mandate is to bring with us the fun, innocent, and childish experiences that these children rightfully deserve but aren’t always able to have. As such, I take pride in being a part of such a dignified service group which holds a lot of true meaning in the actions I take. Some of the things we do include playing with the children with toys, or creating arts and crafts with them ranging from things like paper masks, all the way to sock puppets. It is always a joy when I take part in these fun activities and I’m constantly happy about how many of these children enjoy these activities too.
Last year’s service group had a few obstacles along the way such as the lack of members who took part in this. We had around 5 people to begin with which made it difficult to take care of the numerous children as well as to prepare for various service-related events effectively. Events such as fundraisers, creating the things to sell, finding and buying presents and wrapping them, and even food drives were challenging to coordinate. Now, this year we’ve had several new members join which helps open our service to more pathways on what we can achieve. This year it has been my goal to help guide our service group to be as efficient as possible and to avoid the issues that we faced last year with setbacks and lack of organization.
Image taken by Tanuja Senanayake.
Arts and crafts is a major part of our service activities and we understand that it is our duty to make these moments as enjoyable as we can for the children. That is why during the beginning of the year, planned with great care each of the activities we would conduct each week. We made sure to gather the best materials, all of which were thought of very carefully and chosen so they are easy to use and are nontoxic.
Image taken by Tanuja Senanayake.
One of my favorite moments during this service is getting to play with the children and create a bond with them. Although there is a language barrier which doesn’t allow us to communicate our feelings very effectively, through these activities, we can still create a connection with the things we create or do. It’s always great to have the opportunity to help these children out to see their smile and joy when they achieve their goal and create what they want to. I think it’s an a great thing to use art for this particular situation as it can help express our feelings through the things we create.
Screenshot taken by Kenji Tan.
This is an example of how our service organizes for the events, we use a google document where we put up all our collected ideas for the activities and pictures of some of the ideas we could do. One of my favorite activities was the cup activity where we used paper cups to draw on and decorate in the figure of an animal of choice. We used colored paper, googly eyes, cutout pieces of paper, and pipe cleaners and only our imagination was our limit. Furthermore, we made sure that we had at least two of our members go in during break or lunch to create samples so that we had a model to show the children and for them to base their creations off of. This was a major improvement from what we did last year as we did little to prepare for the sessions before. Now, with the images on the google doc and the samples being made, each of our weekly service sessions has been much more productive and fruitful.
Image taken by Kenji Tan.
Image taken by Saisha.
Overall, it’s great to be involved in such a wholehearted service event.