On the 6th of April 2023, my service, US Peace Corps, finally traveled to Ingiriya on our inaugural service trip to Nambapana K V school. It marked a culmination of almost eight months of online zoom meetings coming to a definite end with our first physical meetup themed around the festive Sinhala New Year Celebrations. Along with the Peace Corps group, we were joined by members of the Memory Project Service, along with Mrs.Eagle, Mrs. Kuruppu, Mrs. Martina, Mr. Seibert and Mr. Purnell – a sizable group of around 15 people.
As I mentioned earlier, this trip marked the end of the tedious online zoom meetings. Our service met with students from across the country online every Thursday afternoon for an hour to converse and practice English speaking and comprehension skills. Each Peace Corps member was given around 5-6 children to engage in conversation in breakout rooms after a brief introduction of the topic at hand. Each meet was themed around a specific predefined topic – for example, your family or the protection of the environment – which were fabricated to challenge our friends with new vocabulary. Our service made it a point to correct and improve their pronunciation and grammar when they spoke – along with giving suggestions on how to be more articulate with their vocabulary choices.
Due to our session being mostly conversational and focused on English proficiency, the trip was planned to be an icebreaker – a fun day out where we break the online barrier and really get to know the children personally. And since it was Sinhala and Tamil New Year season, what more fun could we have planned!
Our day started off with the traditional lighting of the oil lamp (which I proudly did as service leader) and the national anthem in both Sinhala and Tamil. Afterwards we were treated to a showcase of how Sinhalese and Tamils uniquely welcome the New Year with their own traditions, and a few of their festive delicacies (you know I devoured the kavum). We were then treated to a few traditional dance performances organized by the students before the Avurudu games began.
Photo Courtesy: Gecko Net
We were split into 4 teams – kavum, kesari, kokis and vadai – with around 6-7 students and 1-2 OSC students in each team. Now we had to battle it out with the set of games lined up for first place! The games being; lime and spoon, sack race, bun eating, drum playing, traditional dancing, eye on the elephant, pinata (but it is a clay pot) and best laugh and cry competitions. Each person in the team could only participate in 3 games as we had a lot of people. First place was given 30 points, second place 20 points and third place 10 points respectively.
All in all, the games made for some amazing memories and good fun. I was in team kesari, and I was lucky that I got some esteemed Avurudu athletes in my team that gave us an early lead which was maintained throughout the competition. I participated in the clay pot pinata and drum playing games – winning the latter and bagging 30 points for the team. Unfortunately for us, kavum made an unpredictable swift comeback from 0 points after 3 games to 200 points at the end of the competition to bag first place winners. We ended up at second place with 150 points, with kokis with 130 at third and vadai with 70 ending up last.
Looking back at the experience, if I had the chance to do it again I would have had this icebreaker fun session before we started any online zoom meetings. It served as a great barrier-breaking fun exercise which brought all of us closer together – changing the dynamic of the online lessons into more lighthearted, open talks. The barrier of fear or discomfort definitely dissipated, making for a few amazing sessions afterwards before the end of the academic year.