Community service is an annual event at FS and I make sure to be a part of it every year. In this event, children from the government school come to our school for fun activities like arts & crafts, dance, sports, etc. The event goes on for three weekends where we meet the children every weekend and teach them something new. This is a way for them to have some fun and do something which they normally don’t; for us, it’s an opportunity to interact and learn about them. I volunteered for arts and crafts where we taught the children origami, painting (like rock painting and sponge painting), paper crafts, etc.
LO 4: Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences
Community Service did not feel like service, counterintuitively, I used to wait for weekends to come so that I could interact and spend time with the children again. In this experience, it was easy for me to show commitment and perseverance for three weekends because the feeling after spending time with the children from the government school was ineffable; when it was their time to go, every day, they would wave us bye with wide smiles on their faces which made me feel so cheerful for the rest of the day.
LO 5: Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively
While the children were very talented and immensely friendly, being in 3rd-4th grade, they did sometimes get hard to handle. This is when teamwork came into the picture. We were a group of three people who had a batch of 9-10 kids to handle and we would each divide them equally so that we could take care of everyone at the same time and make sure that everyone understood the process while making sure that they don’t run away here and there. At times, there were some things that only one of us knew how to make which helped us a lot in the course of six weekends.
LO 6: Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance
One of the instances I vividly remember from the event is one girl coming to me and asking if she could take a pack of sketch pens home because she wanted to finish a craft that was unfinished in school. This made me realise how privileged I am; for me, a pack of sketch pens is no big deal but for the underprivileged children, even this small pack of 10 sketch pens made them so happy. Inviting them to our school and giving them days where they can enjoy themselves to the fullest doing whatever activity they like was not the solution but a step towards a better future for the children. Like arts and crafts, we also taught students how to use a laptop; who knows, one day, one of these kids will cultivate an interest in computers and excel at it in the future, helping them come out of poverty.
LO 7: Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions
As I referred to the sketch pen story earlier, when the girl asked me if she could take the pack home, ethically the property belonged to the school and it was wrong for the girl to take the sketch pens home, however, if we look at it from a wider perspective, loss of one sketch pen packet from school won’t affect the school even the slightest, whereas, for the girl, it would mean a lot. But still, I didn’t allow her to carry the sketch pen as it was the school’s property.
