This semester (August-December 2019) I have been involved in the Service of Hope for Kids. This semester mostly consisted of getting used to the activities which, our service participates in such as arts, crafts, readings and shopping for the children. At first, I was a bit unfamiliar of how to communicate with the children and the first session consisted of me simply supporting the other members with cutting something out or acquiring some resource/material. Later on, I was able to get directly involved with the kids and start helping them create their designs and tend to their needs.
Surprisingly, this service has also been a way for me to express my more creative side, especially when working with eager children to create a satisfying object such as sock puppets or paper plate designs. This makes me look forward to service as I greatly enjoy working with many of the children at the cancer hospital to create fun little designs and crafts.
Recently, there was the Colombo book fair in which, there would be a wide range of cheap English, Sinhala and Tamil books available to buy. Seeing these books made me realize that our service can entertain the children even when we are not present at the hospital. This could be through the use of books as they are media that can be enjoyed anywhere and at any time. Therefore, I bought many of small coloring books, picture books (for the young audience and then some novels such as harry potter and sherlock holmes for the more advanced readers. I opted to also buy some writing/math practice books since I was not sure if they had been absent from school for some time and wondered if it could help them have some access (even if limited) to some form of education. The main issue was that I was unsure of the linguistic capabilities of the children and if they spoke/read Tamil, Sinhala or English. This led me to buy a whole variety of different types of books including each of the languages mentioned above.
With this large amount of books, it was decided that a group of books would be given every second session to give the children something new once in a while rather than possibly overwhelming them by dumping all the books in one go. I still recall however, a scene in which a child picked up the Sinhala Sherlock Holmes and was so engrossed in the book that for the rest of the session, they spent reading the book in the corner of the room.
Finally, for our last session, we began to wrap the many gifts which, were bought for the children and their families. We opted to wrap them in newspaper as to prevent wasting paper and create some nice designs on the paper. This was initially tedious work due to the large number of gifts that had to be wrapped. After a while, Luca, Seth and I had developed a very industrial and efficient packaging method in which one would cut paper and tape, one would wrap the gift and the other would tape the wrapping in place. This gave us a wrapping rate of about 3 gifts per minute, finishing our batch a bit early and being able to help other members wrap their gifts.
Overall, I have had a good first semester for service and I look forward to delivering the gifts to the children in the next session. This service has brought me so much joy and satisfaction. I also hope to contribute further to this service in the future with the many activities planned and possibly a fundraiser later on in the year.