Week Without Walls

At the Overseas School of Colombo, every year we have an opportunity to do some extra-curricular activities outside of school. This year we went to the south of Sri Lanka, to a place called Hambantota, where we did some service work for two Sri Lankan pre schools that were built after the tsunami a couple years ago. On the 24th of January 2011, we made our way to Hambantota. My plan was to undertake new challenges, take part in planned and initiated activities, work collaboratively with others, show perseverance and committment and consider the ethical implications of my actions during this trip.

What we did over the course of two days was visit a couple post-Tsunami pre-schools in the Hambantota area. When we visited, we were able to meet about 15 young children and we played some games with them for about half an hour. We played musical chairs and drew pictures using the pastels that we brought for them. I really enjoyed playing with the children, they were so adorable and although at first some of them were very shy, after a while they became used to us and started enjoying themselves.

After that, we spent about six hours painting different areas of the school. Some of us painted the outside walls, some the inside walls, some the play ground equipment outside and the rest of us worked on a mural on the wall. I was working on the mural along with three others. Our mural theme was 'outerspace'. I had in fact never done such a large scale painting before so in doing this I was undertaking new challenges and developing new skills. The four of us planned and initiated this, as well as worked collaboratively with each other as we got together as a group and decided on what to draw and who was in charge of painting which part.

On the second day at the school, we played miniature bowling with the children, which was also really fun. We then spent another six hours continuing our murals. We actually finished quite early so I helped out by painting the doors and window sills of the classroom. Because we were using gloss enamel paint, we job was a lot harder than I expected, but I felt that I had developed a new skill by doing it. Over these two days, we as a group showed perseverance and committment as we worked for two days to complete this mural. Our whole group as a whole definitely worked collaboratively with each other to get the different parts of the school painted.

At the end of the two days we did a small play and sang a Sinhala song for the children. We also gave each of them a small gift pack which included school bags, pencil cases, pencils, erasers, colouring pencils, lunch boxes &c. I was really touched by their reaction to these gifts and it made me realize how fortunate I was. I am extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to help a school that needed it.

On the last day of our trip we visited Yala National Park, which was famous for its leopards. We got up at 4:30 to go there and we split up into small groups and went around the park in a Jeep.

These are some of the animals I saw:

• Elephants
• Crocodiles
• Jackels
• Deer
• Mongoose
• Peacocks
• Other birds

Unfortunately, I didn't get to see the leopard although many of the others did. But overall the safari was very enjoyable and I would very much like to visit Yala again!