What is RCCI?

RCCI short for, RCCI Rehabilitation Center For The Communication Impaired is a rehabilitation center who works with children and adults to provide them with school experience and vocational training. RCCI was initially founded in 1993 to address the need for a rehabilitation center for the 1 million people with communication impairments in Sri Lanka. And as of right now RCCI has treated over 12,000 people and the new attached special needs school now provides training to over 60 people.

Integration into OSC:

RCCI has been one of the oldest service groups that has been affiliated to OSC and have been coming to OSC for a while now. Talking about the integration into OSC, the team at RCCI brings over a group of 15-20 people from the rehabilitation center every Thursday to OSC where we host a couple of activities with the children. Usually these activities are interactive as it helps with the hand eye coordination and the communication impairments. Examples of activities include, colouring, painting, basketball, catch and etc. We try our best to teach them new abilities throughout our sessions each thursday and many of the kids do seem to enjoy coming to OSC from RCCI, and interacting with us especially playing ball and the refreshments at the end of each session. COVID-19 has impacted the flow of the service sessions mainly due to the fact that we cannot host the kids at OSC as the campus is closed, whilst the same for them. As well as, it is very difficult to interact with the kids over zoom, as much of the kids do not have the attention span to sit in front of a laptop. But also for the fact that it will be very difficult for us to have activities that we can host virtually. But we hope to get back with them soon.

What We Are Doing Right Now:

As said previously it is impossible to host in person activities with the kids at this stage of the pandemic, but what we can do right now, is to plan for the future (2021) in the hope that we will get to have in person sessions with the kids as it would be much easier to develop the communication aspect, but also the hand eye coordination aspect with the activities that we conduct. In Figure.1 we see the planning process of the thursday sessions. We figured out that in the next semester if they do decide to open school and service for in person activities there will be a total of  12 thursday sessions. And below in Figure 1. we see how we have planned for these sessions. We have made sure to include a variety of activities that they enjoyed from previous experiences. These included physical activities, but also a lot of mental activities such as puzzles and drawing.

One last thing we also did during before the december break, is to spread awareness about the service group and the different disabilities they have, we also decided to create a podcast. This podcast is still in progress and we have created a script and a brief outline. This podcast will be displayed on the RCCI website and possibly to the OSC website to spread awareness about this service group. On the podcast we will give good information about our service group and what we did during that service session in the hope that we could gain more people to join this group. As you can see in Figure 2. it is the planning process of the podcast, and all the students in the service group who are in my grade are entitled to work on this podcast. We split the work on this document among the each of us, which made the process easier. Once we start service next semester we will get to work on creating the actual podcast.

Conclusion:

We still have a lot of work to get done to get ready to do in person activities with the kids next year. But in the 5 sessions we did virtually before the break, we got a lot of things done such as planning for the future. This was much better than when I did RCCI a couple of years ago as then we did not have a plan, and we mainly made up some activities to do on the spot. Even though RCCI isn’t my main service and I usually do the service called Checkmates I am willing to work hard for RCCI. There were many learning outcomes that I accomplished during this process, to state it shortly they were, LO2 which is demonstrating that I have undertaken challenges. Some of these challenges were planning out all 12 lessons with the rest of my peers over zoom. But also planning the podcast. Another learning outcome that I used was LO3 and LO4 which is demonstrating how to initiate and plan a CAS experience and showing commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences. I would like to think that planning out the lessons and the podcast is like a CAS experience as it involves many of the learning outcomes but also helps you with many of the real world circumstances like planning things out. I think also another learning outcome that we accomplished was LO5 demonstrating the skills and recognise the benefits of working collaboratively as essentially the whole planning process was done with other peers, and especially doing it over zoom really made it harder to work together. Lastly and most importantly LO6 was seen everywhere during this process as this learning outcome is, demonstrating engagement with issues of global significance. The idea of disabilities and spreading awareness about them is on global significance and planning podcast about these ideas is demonstrating engagement with issues of global significance.