Community Service was a campaign in which we, as students, had the opportunity to teach and share an engaging experience with children from government schools. They were offered a variety of activities including art and craft, football, dance, ICT, and science projects. Fortunately, we were the ones who taught them all of these entertaining activities during the campaign.

Out of all of these activities, I chose football since that was the activity which I could have taught those children most effectively. We accompanied them for six sessions scheduled on weekends; this was a fun and fruitful experience, and an opportunity for me to help back to the community.

L2. Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills
While teaching them football some of the challenges I faced were
– Those children were underprivileged so they didn’t know about the sport football , indicating they didn’t have prior knowledge about the sport, So we had to teach the students from scratch, starting from the rules of the game and showing them from which part they have to kick the ball and pass it.
– Another challenge I faced was with language barriers as the language they were used to communicate was Gujarati/ Kathiyawadi and I just knew Gujarati from the basics. Talking with them, conversing with them, and making them understand how to play football without proper medium of communication was a difficult task.
These challenges helped me develop some new skills, which include
– Finding some innovative ways to teach them football, such as building motivation and creating a positive environment around them, we divided them into groups and made them stand in queues to teach them how to shoot the ball into a goal, so whenever one of them scored a goal, the entire group would cheer with loud noises and clap for that one guy, adding energy to the activity.
– Another skill I developed was communication and leadership, as I and my friends were the ones teaching those children and conversing with them was difficult for us. Over time, I learned some ways to speak their level of Gujarati and made them understand what the task was as a leader. As the leader, I also learned how to keep motivating those children even though they failed to complete the task assigned.

L5. Demonstrate skills and benefits of working collaboratively
During this campaign, some of my classmates assisted me in teaching those children football. As an IB student, I’ve had a lot of experience working cooperatively in groups, which helped me with my work here. As there were several problems, such as language barriers, I enlisted the assistance of a friend who spoke Gujarati and asked him to translate my instructions from Hindi to Gujarati for those children. There were also a large number of children, making it difficult to handle them all. My team members and I divided the roles for the activities we planned evenly so that we could manage them easily.

L6. Engagement with issues of global significance
As we all know, the world is currently focused on the SDGs, which are expected to be accomplished by 2030. Through community service, we helped to address global concerns by including SDG 3 ‘Good Health and Well-Being’ and SDG 4 ‘Quality Education’. Football is a sport that requires a great deal of physical activity; by keeping youngsters active, we can improve their physical health. Everyone has the right to a great education, but quality education is more than just studies; we are here to help them explore something (football) new that is not widely recognized in India, and to provide them with the same chances as the affluent.

Conclusion:
To summarise, this was a rewarding experience for me since it allowed me to venture outside of my comfort zone and share my enthusiasm with others who may not have had the same opportunities. Throughout the campaign I learned many new things, especialy it helped me develop a learner profile attribute communicator as they weren’t quite good with hindi and I wasn’t good with gujarat so I had faced diffuclties to interact with, however I found ways to overcome it. It was an excellent way to give back to the community through an interesting event.