Looking Back

 

Last year I was one of the service leaders for the US PeaceCorps Cultural Exchange Program – where we collaborated with the US Department of State in order to virtually connect with rural Sri Lankan school children to teach English grammar and help refine their speaking skills. Since last year was my first at OSC, I was quite surprised to instantly obtain a leadership post, especially with a collaborative service like USPC where we had to constantly keep up-to-date with the US Embassy plan for the program. However, I navigated the post quite well in order to constantly come up with novel lesson plans for each 1-hour session with the school children, which encompassed a balanced cultural mix of Buddhist, Tamil, Hindu, Islamic and Catholic kids, and to plan the final service trip to Ingiriya where we ended off the service year with Avurudu celebrations with the schoolchildren. 

Reflecting on the last year, one of my major criticisms of the service structure was that it was wholly online. Not only did it make forming meaningful bonds with the schoolchildren difficult over a screen, it led to many frustrating sessions of connectivity issues (many children were in rural parts of the country with poor cellular connectivity) and shy respondents who refused to engage with our planned activities. In short, even though US PeaceCorps was good on paper, it was definitely what it should have been in practice. 

 

***

What’s Ahead?

 

As a service leader, I felt that something had to be done. My breakthrough however came quite quickly in the form of an announcement by Mrs. Martina, our service teacher, stated that we would not be collaborating with the US Department of State or the US PeaceCorps for the next academic year. Honestly, this was quite the shock as the announcement was made very late – however I thought of it as a net positive as it meant that we had full control of our service activities going forward. With this new control, the first thing that came to mind was to somehow and someway switch our service model to a physical, in-person service. 

I was extremely satisfied with our planned service outcomes, even during our US PeaceCorps mandate. Our goals were simple: teach the schoolchildren English, with an emphasis on vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar, whilst encouraging them to converse across schools with the other schoolchildren from different religious backgrounds. This was incredibly important for me and I wanted the goals to remain that way. After Sri Lanka’s brutal 30 year civil war and especially after the more recent 2019 Easter Sunday Bombings, irrevocable scars were left tattered on the social harmony of the nation between the Buddhist majority and the other minorities. I wanted the cultural exchange to go on – especially after seeing the children have so much fun and positive interaction with each other during our physical Avurudu celebrations in Ingiriya, it solidified my view that this service was doing more than just teaching children english. It was healing an infected wound scarring our nation.

 

Planning: The Move to Physical 

 

With the dawn of the new academic year, Mrs. Martina, Mr. Polous and I got straight into work to plan our new service – Cultural Exchange Program. Our first milestone was reached when we secured a meeting with the regional officer at the Department of Education to discuss our service structure and goals – the Department’s objectives were to deem our plan good or bad, and then proceed to find suitable four underprivileged schools, one Islamic, one Hindu, one Buddhist and one Catholic, within the area to conduct our service every Thursday after school. 

For the meeting, I had prepared a few documents which entailed a lesson plan for an ordinary session and a vocabulary list with difficult terms to be covered in that session. When we went to the Department of Education, however, I learnt that the meeting was not only with the regional officer, but also with the principals and english teachers of the respective local schools who were already nominated for our program. I had to change my initial approach to present an impromptu speech on the objectives, structure, activities and potential topics for our service. Safe to say, Mr. Polous was quite impressed after I was done talking about it, so were the respective principals of the local schools – it was starting to come together.

Fast forward from the meeting to a few weeks after it – by this stage Mrs. Martina and I had established frequent and effective communication with the local schools and had made a plan for the first semester which encompassed 8 sessions with the local children. We were in the process of finalizing transport for the local children to travel from their schools, which were mainly in the suburbs of Colombo, to our OSC campus each Thursday to participate in the sessions. Furthermore, we were granted additional funding to provide basic snacks and drinks for the children during each session – who doesn’t love a mini pizza!

The structure was simple – 40 local schoolchildren (10 from each school) would attend the program. They would be split into two groups of 20 where each group would alternate to attend sessions every other Thursday at our campus – each session they would be taught english vocabulary and converse in english whilst learning about a core topic such as the weather and climate or themed topics like Halloween (it’s a cultural exchange after all). Activities would include kahoots, interactive games like roleplaying a weather reporter for a news channel and bingo. At the end of the 8 sessions, they would sit a basic exam covering everything they learnt with us to obtain a certificate of completion from OSC and the Department of Education.

 

I have a very good feeling about this new service structure. Being at the helm of guiding the service to what it is, and what it will be, has been quite the experience. I hope to set off to a wonderful start this year and to cultivate the same enthusiasm I have for this endeavor in my other service members. After all, this is my final year in school – I have to hand this service on to good hands. Hands that I will teach personally.