It’s quite surprising how a once in a century situation like the coronavirus pandemic can impact our day to day schedules and manage to catch us completely off guard. For the local service, in particular, we felt the impacts of the outbreak in intervals. Almost immediately after the Chinese New Year, as school stopped external visits to campus, we had our very first problem, we couldn’t hold lessons anymore. This was even more concerning because this coincided with the start of season 3 which meant that we had new grade nines joining our service, who didn’t extensively know about what we do and would probably not be able to take part in these lessons until the next year. This is why one of the ideas was to get the grade nines involved with writing on the portfolio about mental health problems in Singapore as that is a local issue that our service was associated with and would help fill up our dormant page. This is the link to our local service portfolio. Even with that in place, we needed more things to do during the scheduled service time. As a team, we brainstormed ideas for possible projects we could pursue remotely to help our partners and help set up for next year.

The first idea was to take this opportunity to really work on our service portfolio, and add reflections about the year, what’s went well and what hasn’t gone well. Even though this seemed like a reasonable plan to follow, my mind was thinking about completely different things. I was genuinely frustrated at the circumstances we had found ourselves in, I couldn’t help but ask why did this virus have to force the visits to stop? Unfortunately, I also knew the answer to that question all along, not only would it be tremendously risky, as it would pose a threat to the school community but also the risk it would present for our partners, many of whom are seniors who might be more likely to catch the virus. Yet, I wasn’t content with this as the solution- do nothing about the lessons and continue with administrative filing. That’s why I came up with the idea of recording screencasts of us using various different computer applications and emailing that to the centre for them to watch. A possible concern was that screencasts are quite common online therefore us recording them would essentially be a waste. While I did realise the crux of the argument made I felt as though that didn’t matter, simply because recording screencasts was a medium for us to use something we are familiar with to maintain our connection with the service partners during these tough and extraordinary circumstances.

Here is the link to our recap videos folder.