I have been doing the local service with YMCA Student Care Centre the past 6 months. I started this service from February in grade 9. During the last school year, we were working with the YMCA at Pasir Ris. Every Tuesday after school, we went to the centre and played activities with the children. From this year, the school stopped the Tuesday sessions, so I decided to join the Friday group. We work with a different YMCA centre, and unlike last year, the children come to UWCSEA.

The purpose of this service is to provide an opportunity for the YMCA children to simply have fun and bring excitement in daily life. Last year, we mainly played ‘party games’ since we had very limited space at the centre. Playing “Bang” as a ‘starter’ every session really helped to remember each other’s names. After a couple of sessions, each of us had a couple of children familiar to, which helped create a stronger bond between our group and the service provider. A highlight for me would be the bowling session. Since we had been repeating these games over and over again each sessions, I thought it might be nice to do something different, and brought up the idea. The kids really seemed to be enjoying, which made me very happy! I believe our group was able to collaborate well and was very organised. During the planning sessions, we planned out all the sessions – what activities we will be doing, who will be leading those activities, who is in charge of the resources, and backup plans. Everyone remembered their responsibilities, which allowed us to carry out the sessions very smoothly.

This year, with a totally new group, we started off the first couple of sessions again with planning. After discussion, we have decided to not only do games, but have a focus every session based on some aspects of the education at UWC we receive. This we thought would make our sessions more unique to UWC, and would be able to provide some sort of an educational experience to the children. We have just finished the first several sessions, which are, I believe, going well. The first session was which my group had organised, where we decided to focus on recycling. Over the October break, we collected toilet paper rolls, and with the YMCA children, created pencil stands out of them. The children seem to be enjoying these sessions, but perhaps, as we are putting “education” as one of our purposes, we must find out a method to indicate if they have actually had any takeaways from our sessions. 

Service has allowed me to think from a different person’s perspective, figuring out what our service provider would want us to do. I have realised how such massive effort is needed to organise these simple one hour sessions! The biggest takeaway would be learning how to collaborate with others, especially sharing and joining ideas, and equally allocating responsibilities within the group. This would definitely benefit me in the future, from group tasks at school to projects at work. Furthermore, through interacting with the local children, I was able to feel a closer relationship with the Singaporean community. I believe that such interactions will allow us to naturally share our different cultures and ideologies, which will stimulate mutual understanding and respect. I reaffirmed how important being open-minded is to maintain peace within diversity.

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