Hope for Kids in semester two started off with a session of planning and introducing the new students. We had three new participants, so we introduced them to the group and explained the processes of our service to them. The second part of our first session was spent planning the third term CCC House visits and checking what items would need to be bought.

As three seniors in our service left in April, I started as service leader together with Seth. I was both happy and not so happy about this, since it I though it would be both more work but also an interesting and enriching experience. Looking back, I am truly glad to be service leader, as it offered me a position in which I can improve my leadership skills, which involve cooperation, communication and being able to organize and lead a group, all of which are valuable skills to have both now and later in life.

Because we often do coloring sessions, we decided to have a focus more on making things that involve folding paper and cutting, which is more variable and often produces more satisfying results. The third term had a few bigger events for our service, such as Valentine’s Day on February 14th Mother Language Day on February 21st and the annual dry rations food drive, which started in March and continued into the second semester.

For Valentine’s Day, we planned to make hearts with the children, but there was a misunderstanding and it turned out the children where already involved in another activity. We decided to make the hearts nonetheless and hang them onto the doors of the rooms in the CCC House. We wrote a short greeting on each of the hearts and attached a string to hang them on the door handles and then hung them up around the hospital. On Mother Language Day (which was the day the students I was hosting for SAISA Art arrived) we decided to sing songs in each of our first language, which was a cool idea, since is was interesting to listen to Danish, Hindi, Sinhala and German (myself) songs.

The largest project of the second semester is the dry rations food drive, in which every grade brings dry rations that will then be donated to the cancer hospital. Food items include sugar, tea, samaposha, dhal, etc., as well as reusable grocery bags. My grade was responsible for tea, and since it is my service I tried my best to get my classmates to bring a lot of tea. At the service session before we delivered the food, we divided all the collected food up for each bag and labelled and organized everything so that we would not get confused.

 

Everything was brought to the CCC house on April 4, where we gave one bag to each family. Most people, who took their children with them, greeted us heartily and were thankful to see the gifts they received from us, which was a great moment. This is one of the reasons I truly enjoy being in this service, that you have the impression my actions have a positive impact on other people’s lives, which I think is one of the greatest satisfactions one can get.