Service: The First Couple of Encounters

The last few weeks we started our first service 'encounter' with the primary kids on Thursday 23rd and Monday 27th, with Grade 3 and Pre-School D respectively. Making us engaged in issues of global importance, as mentioned in previous in my previous service post, since language and culture are dying in the modern world, and although we are not influencing the encouragement of language and culture on a large scale, we are doing it on a small scale and every small bit counts. Also we are giving back to the community we live in.

Our first session was with the Grade 3 on Thursday, Kevin (my peer and co-worker) and I we quite unfamiliar with type of service work, especially since this service is relatively new within the community, and we had to exercise high leadership skills since the kids were much much younger than other candidates we had led (example: me in after school basketball), but we saw this as an opportunity to develop new skills on this particular quality (undertaking new challenges). But, overall, I think it went pretty well, we focused on introducing ourselves and getting to know the kids a bit better, while giving them a feel for how the Sinhalese classes will be like. We planned and initiated to teach them how to say 'my name is...,' 'my age is....,' and the basic colours all in Sinhalese, and the kids caught on surprisingly well; I think one the main reasons being we, as a group gelled really well (working collaboratively with others), and also since the kids were really good group.
Later, next week, we had a session with Preschool D, Kevin and I had a similar plan with Preschool as with Grade 3, get to know the kids and introduce some basic terms (but a little less due to the younger age). However, when we arrived it was a lot tougher than we thought, as the kids were a bit active and yet extremely shy of us. So we had take the lesson a bit slower than anticipated. However, we taught them 'my name is...' and the basic colours in Sinhalese, however most of them could not remember. Thus Kevin and I decided we should refresh their memories about things we had learnt the week before, every week. But we saw real potential in all the kids, from both Grade 3 and Preschool D.
Judging from all the excitement and fun from these last previous two session, I can tell there is a lot of good things to come from these kids and our service!

Kevin and I with some of the Preschool D kids!