My Year 9 Community Project
In year 9, we were given a task to get into groups, explore the sustainable development goals and to create a service or project to help the community in some way. 2 of my friends, Emma and Lyla and I were put into a group together and decided that we would like to help the goals, #1, No Poverty and #4, Quality Education. We made a plan to go and help young kids who have lost their families and now live in orphanages by providing some snacks, daily life material such as toiletries and by teaching them a few life lessons.
We started the project by bringing them snacks for the first few time's w had gone and continued to try by bringing the kids what they wanted/needed. Because of this, we have identified the needs of orphaned kids in this organization and helped improve their well being, and overall happiness in life. We have addressed their needs of food/snacks, coloring pencils and books to study allowing an improvement in their quality of life and daily needs such as toiletries. This is a video summarizing what we had done last year and how this took place in the orphanage Good Shepherd Sisters.
This is the folder which we used to plan our process
And this is the link to the document with all the official trip videos (not including the main final video)
We had taken a lot of meaningful action throughout these past 6 months, as said in the video, going to the orphanage and giving them different items, playing with them every month allowing us to develop good relationships with the kids at this orphanage. Every time we had gone to the location, we talked to them, played games with them and ran around to play with all the kids. They really appreciated this, as they may not get as much attention from people other than their caretakers.
After we had gone to this orphanage throughout the year for our community project, we continued to keep in touch with them and had gone to meet the kids for the last time during our summer break. This time, we had gone since 9am in the morning, and stayed with the kids for the whole day; playing games, giving them art lessons and just communicating with them in general. We even ate lunch with them! From year 10 and onwards, we continue to work with the service group, Art Relief Crew, as our partners (as said in the video). We have been talking to the members of the Art Relief Crew, but they had said that at the moment we should work with ‘Steps with Theera’ and we may incorporate good shepherd sisters next year.
Also, one of the group members, Emma, had left NIST at the end of year 9 and Lyla will be leaving at the end of year 10, leaving me to hopefully continue this project in the following years with the members of Art Relief Crew. From this experience, I had developed a lot of understanding about the life of kids who live in this orphanage and about how it feels like to be put in that situation.
I have also learnt many skills in communication and how to help others in need (as said in the video). This has been an amazing experience for me and hope to continue developing and helping this organization.
Overall, I have developed many new experiences about our community in Bangkok and the different needs of people, especially children who live in orphanages/without their parents. This has connected me to the children in the organization allowing me to feel more free while interacting with new people and having fun and helping these kids at the same time. This has connected me to my education in school such as our IAS units connecting to the global goals and the recent IDU in year 10, ‘creation of a art piece that reflects on a sustainable development goal, by deepening my understanding of the world around us and the circumstances that people may be put into, which will help me in the outside world such as, helping me understand the circumstances that people are put into and it can help me find new ways to help with this issue and goal #1: No poverty. The experience has helped me in a variety of classes, as said before, but has also helped me outside of school, when I travel, I see the differences between absolute and relative poverty and how people live within certain circumstances. After this experience, I felt very good about what I had done for these kids, by bringing them joy and basic needs at least once a month and I will make sure to use my learning from these experiences, to enhance my vision of the world, by helping more people/kids who are in need. My communication skills were developed, allowing me to be more confident (especially while talking in a different language) and I will continue to care for and try my best to help goals 1, 2 and 4 of the sustainable development goals, to the best that I can by taking action and continuing to communicate with service groups at NIST and people outside NIST.
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