The leaflet handed out by Hüsk. (Pic cred: The author).

RTR is back!

Service has begun once more for the new semester, after the chaos of studying for mocks and applying for universities – being back with RTR’s community felt quite rejuvenating. For the first meeting of the semester, there was quite a lot on the agenda.

We started off with a bit of catching up with our visiting ex-leader, Liam, and then recapping what we accomplished last semester. Then we started the talks of future fundraising ideas and the plans for future literary festivals (perhaps even another karaoke night!). As of right now, there are many endeavors that we plan to accomplish yet are still in the planning stage.

Afterward, we heard from Zak about his trip to Jaffna and the service activities that they conducted there. Then, we were given a presentation by Hüsk founder, Chavez, on the Little Trees preschool project they are conducting in Mannar.

Chavez’s presentation. (Pic cred: The author).

This was a highly enlightening presentation, and Chavez talked about the various resource disparities faced by the residents – particularly as a result of the civil war. He detailed their progress with building the preschool and prospective benefits for the children of Mannar.

This project seemed quite reminiscent of RTR’s building of Vidyaloka School’s library, thus, I believe everyone was quite keen on supporting Chavez with his goal of schooling 50 children from the 3 villages in Mannar.

We brainstormed ways in which we could help this project, such as by funding them through bake sales or carrying out donation drives. I believe that this partnership will be extremely productive for our community, and I look forward to exploring it further in the future.

Learning outcomes:

• LO2 – Challenge & skills
  • There are many events and fundraisers planned for RTR’s semester 2, although I realise that this will take a lot of collaborative effort, I’m ready to take upon these challenges.
  • It will allow for the refining of my collaboration and productivity, my goal for service in semester 2 is primarily to have an even bigger impact on my community by carrying out more events/ fundraisers that will help our partner schools.

• LO3 – Initiative & planning
  • The consistency at which RTR carries out its project is one of my favourite aspects of my service! Thus, I believe that brainstorming and conducting these activities is one of the best ways of engaging this learning objective.

• LO4 – Working collaboratively with others
  • I firmly believe that RTR would not have progressed this far in their objective without the collaboration of all the members. In today’s session, I could feel the inter-team collaboration through our discussions as well as our budding partnership with Chavez.
  • With the potential for future large-scale fundraisers, I expect that there will be much more collaboration and teamwork with the members.