CAS Blog: Service

Recently for TFC we have been talking about how to spread awareness on this serious issue, across the island (engaged in issues of global importance), and we agreed on starting in local schools, both national and international, as we thought young adults was an appropriate place to start, especially since they are the future of our world, yet we are still deciding on a fixed age group to discuss this issue (consideration of ethical implications).
To aid of mission of spreading awareness, we developed a video, where our members and I discussed about the issues of child sex tourism, how everyone is effected by it, what happens to the children, and the significant facts, both on a international and national scale, to help people understand the country we live in. We plan to present this video to certain schools in Colombo (or even outside Colombo),to help our audience get a clear vision on our group (our aims and goals), and understand more about the frightening issue itself.

On the week before Halloween (the 24th of October), my service and I started our first planned and initiated activities to raise money to reach our current semester goal; to raise awareness of the global issue and the organization (engaged in issues of global importance).
   We decided to have a movie night for the junior school kids (as I stated in one my earlier posts). Firstly we had to choose the movie, and in order to achieve that we sent out slips in prior of the movie night for a vote on the movie, and Brave ended winning. A few days later we had created our permission forms for the kids, and asking for an entrance fee of Rs. 300. However there were some complaints from the parents, as since our service is based on "child sex tourism," some parents thought we were talking and explaining about the particularly sensitive topic, but no such thing was going to happen or happened as our service realizes that the topic is a bit inappropriate and have aimed discussions on this topic for senior grades.
    Although we faced an obstacle and had to think about the ethical implications of our actions we continued with the movie night. At the event 30-40 kids had showed up, which more than we expecting, especially with the complaints we had received. Also the movie night was much harder than we had thought, as I think most of us had forgotten the fact we were dealing with younger kids, so we were quite unprepared as controlling and being responsible for 30-40 kids was a lot tougher than we thought.
    In the end it was a great experience/movie night for the us and the kids. Also in total we had raised Rs. 23,000, which was more than enough to get started on our goal for the semester; to raise awareness of the issue, and to purchase supplies for when we meet some of the kids we work to help.
   To raise awareness, besides the representatives across Colombo, we decided to create a video we could publish, so it would be easier for us and the representatives to achieve a way of introducing the organizations and its objectives to the public.