This was my first time doing service and I started it because I heard about it when I was new to school in homeroom. Where my service leaders Akhil and Stephie were asking for donations since the kids needed goggles for swimming.

Well, you’re probably asking why these “kids” need goggles and why they’re swimming. SOS Village is a service where we take kids from the orphanage and then bring them to OSC to teach them English and then later put those skills to work and have fun in the pool.

( photo of me in the pool taken by Gecko Net)

On the first day, I met the kids and eventually buddied up with one of them named Chaminda, I got to know him very well and his English skills were already not bad so helping him improve was smooth sailing. We do many tests like associating actions with words or pictures to teach the kids English and most times let them take the lead so we can see their leadership skills and also see their progress
I also made many new friends through the service and also connected with them while doing activities with the kids

We also had a campaign of donating goggles to the kids for swimming before I joined the service, which went pretty well but still wasn’t enough so we decided to have a bake sale of cookies to raise funds so we could buy the goggles ourselves. We brought all the ingredients to school and made around 40 cookies that we sold the next day and we made a total of 20,000+ lkr which we then used to buy googles and distributed them to the kids 2 weeks later as well as some school merch.

Overall it was a very fun experience where I got to teach kids how to swim as well as English in a leadership role while also having fun, I’ve stuck with SOS Village for both semesters and I plan on continuing it forever 🙂