Bonding with our local community and interacting with individuals outside of OSC, that are underprivileged or face difficulties in their lives is an essential part of the CAS program. As IB students, that come from a variety of backgrounds, we are expected to be empathetic learners. And what better way to become one than hands-on experience with a variety of individuals facing different challenges? My service, GeckoNetwork, decided that as a service group, we too are expected to meet this expectation. However, we are a tech service, our goal as a service group is to document all events and activities of the school. Our targeted community is OSC and we publish all photography and videography on our website. So, instead of transforming our service into something completely different, we decided to work collaboratively with other service groups within OSC. This is a project that we are enforcing as a group, to not only help us improve on becoming empathetic learners, but also give back to the service groups themselves. As I said, the community we service is OSC and since our purpose as a group is to document all activities around the school, when participating in these Microdocumentaries, we have agreed to also take pictures and videos of the members of that service group and share it with them for their own use.
Furthermore, Microdocumentaries have a certain conditions and regulations. The first one being that Microdocumentaries will happen only once every 2 weeks so that we may have a spear week to plan and organize any additional work that we have been requested to do. Obviously, not everyone in the service will participate in each Microdocumentary, however, everyone is expected to participate in at least one. We have a choice of 12 service groups at OSC to document and work with within this next semester. However, there are restrictions to documentation in certain services, for example: Girls for Girls. Girls for Girls is an all-girls service group that works with victims of sexual assault that vary between ages 16-22. Due to their traumatic and damaging experience, there have been some regulations set so that their identities do not get published. By taking a photo or video of them, their face is on the world wide web, and their assaulters can get back in reach with them. To avoid this inconvenience, we have decided that when working with those types of groups, that we do not take any pictures or videos, and if we do, we have theirs or their supervisors’ consent and permission.
This week, on the 29th of November, we did our very first microdocumentary with Gecko Inc. Gecko Inc is a service group lead by their two service leaders: Tavin Foneska and Lukas Hettiarachi. The purpose of this service groups is “to teach kids from a local Sri Lankan school the basic skills and safety needed to be safe when swimming. As Sri Lanka is an island its highly important that basic swimming skills and water safety are provided to everyone.” –Tavin Foneska. For this Microdocumentary, we had four of our members attend the session: Karla, Jiwon, Praneeth and I. We learnt a lot about the kids and how their challenge is having access to a pool or a clean source of water to practice their swimming skills. I, unfortunately, was not given the opportunity to swim since I was unaware of the Microdocumentaries project until this service, and so I came unprepared. However, I stood by the sides and played with them by throwing pool toys into the water and encouraging them to take jumps and dives into the water. Most of the younger children had float supporters and spent majority of their time having fun and playing, while, the older children were more focused on the survival components of swimming. I found that the children are very confident in the water and they are quite outgoing. The relationships between the OSC students and local school children is very strong and I can easily tell there is a lot of trust involved in this relationship, and this is a result from being exposed or involved in Gecko Inc.
Overall, I found that this experience was extremely fun and enjoyable. I loved connecting with the local school children as they were incredibly playful. It also made me grow an interest towards Gecko Inc. and hope to participate in the upcoming Microdocumentary for another service group as the experience was absolutely fantastic.