This year I changed my service to Hope for Kids, a decision grounded in careful consideration and alignment with my aspirations and future goals as a medical professional. Hope for Kids aims to provide quality care to cancer patients, specially adolescents and kids around Colombo. This includes running awareness programs, organizing fundraisers and also visiting hospitals to provide for these cancer patients.

We began the year by asking people around school to dress up in yellow, for child cancer awareness. Although gold is the colour associated with childhood cancer, we thought a similar shade like yellow would be more feasible to dress up in.

Following that in the October, our service’s main aim now was to spread cancer awareness, specially Breast cancer Awareness since it’s Breast cancer awareness month. For that purpose, we firstly prepared posters and infographics on the issue related to breast cancer. These posters incorporated various aspects about cancer, like what it is and who to contact. This week we also asked people around the school to dress in pink, to honour survivors, remember those lost to the disease, and to support the progress we are making together to defeat breast cancer.

Infographics on Breast Cancer

We also did a books and cookies about our service, educating the people at our school about cancer and its effects. For the future, we now aim to host a cricket match fundraiser, run a donation drive and visit hospitals to keep in line with the aims of our service.

Throughout this process I developed the following Learning Outcomes:

LO5: Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively. The service primarily entailed collaborative group work, wherein we divided tasks such as creating posters and handling various errands, ensuring a more efficient workflow. Instead of each person focusing on only the posters, we made different groups who performed different tasks say writing an email to associated people.

LO6: Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance. Cancer holds immense global significance as one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. And for that purpose, through this service, I aim to do my part to spread awareness about this disease.