New Community and Service activity: SOS Orphanage

At the start of this new semester, I decided to change my CAS activity from Recycling and Sustainability to SOS Orphanage. The reason I switched was because; since Recycling was based on service to the Environment, I wanted to try out an activity program that provides service in the Human aspect. This change would allow me to increase the awareness of my strengths and areas for growth, since I would be seeing how I would cope in a different environment entirely.

In SOS Orphanage, we bring the kids from an orphanage and we basically try to teach them various skills such as; Swimming (which takes up the majority of the time spend in Service sessions), English and also teach them about different countries, in order to give them a global perspective and to actually give them an insight as to what is out there, since these kids have never had the opportunity to travel to other countries like we have. I try to plan and initiate activities during the group sessions, such as by making sure teach them new words on one day, and maybe grammar the next. Because there are a large number of kids who come here; we are divided in to separate groups consisting of at least one of us from OSC and two of the kids from the orphanage. This way, we have the chance to get to know them better and teach them much more easily and effectively as opposed to teaching them all together at once. Fortunately in my group, I have a partner, Hyung Suk, to help me in teaching the kids. I am given the opportunity to work collaboratively with him, in order to teach them effectively. My group consists of Me, Hyung Suk (from OSC), Sandaruwan and Madu.

During SOS sessions, we are meant to stay with our assigned kids from the time they arrive to the moment we get in to the pool; in the pool we are to attend to all the kids due to safety reasons. Hyung Suk and I teach them English through ways they like to learn, and this is through drawings. I have asked them draw a picture of their liking and then after that, label all the objects that are seen in the picture in English. Since I can also speak Sinhala like them, I am able to teach them English words quite easily.

After this, we go down to the pool area where we teach the kids some basic swimming techniques. We try to teach them to be confident to take on the open water, as well as assure that they learn all the techniques needed for swimming as well.

I feel that I have made a good decision by joining this CAS activity because it is something that tries to educate under-privileged kids in an international community, we teach them things that are outside Sri lanka and also where our country is in our world. Kids being orphaned is an issue of global importance, and being able to work, teach and simply have fun with them in the pool would surely mean a lot to them, since they are not given as many opportunities as we do.

me (on the left) helping out one of the kids to swim

group photo of the OSC students in SOS