Me, With one of the hope for kids patients, creating “cup critters”. (photo taken by Seth Keerthiratne
Recently, I had joined to hope for kids service group in which we travel to the local children’s cancer hospital and plan a variety of fun and engaging activities to provide the children who are currently under treatment with some positive energy. Some activities include crafts such as playdough or sock puppets or other activities such as drawing or coloring. The most challenging part of this service is the seating arrangements for the children as well as the language barrier that exists between me and some of the patients at the hospital. Speaking neither Tamil nor Sinhala I find it difficult to communicate and normally resort to hand gestures to indicate activities or questions. This again is difficult because I don’t always understand what the children necessarily need and I want to know how I could help in any way possible. Normally, it ends up with me asking one of the Sri Lankan members of the service for help in translating but this takes up some time and sometimes causes some confusion.
Therefore, to counter this, I will begin to learn some basic Tamil and Sinhala to be able to create some kind of communication between me and the children at the cancer hospital. Even having a simple sheet with some translations would be enough to create a basic form of communication between me and some of the patients making it easier for me to help the children in any way possible.
I have also had some successes in the service as well. My natural creativity really comes into play when working with these children and I can help them create fun and unique designs for whatever they seek to craft. For example, in the latest session, we made sock puppets and one child thought the head looked a bit dull. Then, taking one of the pipe cleaners and bending it into a U-shape I was able to mount some furry ears onto the puppet making it look fun and colorful, within 10 minutes I had to put ears on the sock puppets of most of the children as they enjoyed the aesthetic so much.
I look forward to the next quarter in this service group and hope to enhance my involvement even further. I have planned to go to the Colombo book fair and buy a selection of children’s books and coloring books as a donation to the hospital to provide the patients there with some fun activities even if the service group isn’t there.