As I mentioned in my previous service post, The One with My New Service Group: Girls For Girls, this year I joined the Girls For Girls service group. Girls For Girls focuses on helping female victims of sexual assault and harassment. We collaborate with Emerge Global Lanka, where the girls are placed in a shelter for about 3 months and are provided with the preparation needed to return back to society. Something done each year by the G4G service is the wall climbing activity, where the girls would come to visit our school and we would spend about an hour wall climbing with them.
The wall climbing activity itself has two components of strength to it, which is what makes the activity really effective, important and moving to them: mental and physical. They both impact the climber differently but hold the same amount of weight on the progress of the climb and control the climber’s ability to reach the top. The physical strength of the climber controls their ability to reach the top in a very legitimate sense, however, none of the girls struggled to climb the wall physically. The main challenge was empowering the girls’ mental strength since they needed it to make it to the top of the wall. The emotional trust the girls needed to climb the wall was something we focused a lot on throughout the session and was, in the end, a success.
With the help of our team and the girls, we were able to support every climber physically and emotionally throughout the climb. Although there was a language barrier between our team and the girls, as they only spoke Sinhala and we conversed in English, we still helped by cheering them on and giving them basic directions during the climb.
Personally, I helped out with the gearing up part of the climb and cheering them on. When climbing, there is certain equipment needed for safety measures, these include climbing rope, harness, belay device, carabiner, etc. Our supervisors had already attached the rope to the carabiner, so I helped out with putting on the belay devices for the girls. Once, they were geared up, I began to help with the support factor of the climb. I speak a little bit of Sinhala, so I was able to provide them with some direction during the climb and where to step. However, it would have been useful to know the colors of the climbing steps to make the directions clearer. So, I thought it would be interesting to have a workshop or session in the future where the girls teach us basic Sinhala, and how to say different colors, count to 20, say a few common sentences and sing a few songs.
We had three teachers from The Overseas School of Colombo helping our team with the logistics of the activity: Mr. Duncan, Ms. Camila, and Mr. Eric. They were all a great support and helped us out with the process of gearing up the girls and providing them with instructions. Ms. Camila even offered to and gave an example of how the girls should be climbing and searching for the next steps, and how to come down the wall.
Overall, I found this experience to be quite enrichening as we worked collaboratively with the girls and developed new skills while doing so, as we had to learn how to gear up a climber and understand the fundamentals of climbing. Every activity we do is planned and initiated by members of the group, so we had to work out the logistics for this session to be successful. The logistics included: finding teachers to help us, permission to use the equipment, maintenance to have the wall ready for the girls, etc. I felt that we undertook the challenge of breaking the language barrier between the girls and us and speaking in the limited Sinhala I know. And finally, as always, we were engaged in an issue of global importance as we are fighting gender inequalities to encourage these women to challenge their mental and physical strengths, by engaging in activities such as these.