Service

Kolkata GC 2018

tanej8613@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg Service 0 Comment

This year I am involved in planning the Kahaani dance show for the last time. I have once again been assigned to the logistics team, but being a more senior member of the GC meant that this year my role involved a lot more leadership and responsibility than it had before. I have to take on a greater amount of tasks, as well as explain to the younger, less experienced members of the group how to carry out their own tasks. The show will take place in January, so our responsibilities include allocating people into different dances, finding rehearsal spaces to the dancers, organising the facilities for the day of the show, etc.

Compared to last year, I feel a greater amount of responsibility having helped to run so many shows before. While I feel confident about completing all the tasks properly and on time, not having the older and more experienced members to help guide the show and rely on for help has been a bit challenging. I have had to develop leadership skills in order to provide support to the group and take on the challenge of planning the show without other members to fall back on, which relates to the 2nd CAS Learning Outcome.

Kahaani Rehearsals

tanej8613@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg Kahaani Dance, Kolkata GC 0 Comment

While this is my second year helping to organise the annual ‘Kahaani’ shows with my global concern Kolkata GC, this is my first time actually participating in the dance myself. I chose to sign up as a dancer this year as I was particularly fond of this year’s theme. The theme of the show this year is to have its entirety act as an interview of a disabled person, discussing the adversity they faced and how they were able to overcome this to realise their full potential as a human being with just a minor obstacle to overcome, yet capable of doing all that those without their disability can achieve. Each dance is intended to represent a defining moment in the person’s life. Therefore, I felt that that the dancers had a more important role than ever, which led me to my decision to sign up myself. I have not danced since I was 9 years old and even at that time, I felt very under confident and unhappy doing so. Therefore I knew that this would be a challenge for me, as I would be working with people who are confident dancers and will have less trouble processing and understanding the steps than I would. Therefore this relates to the 2nd and 6th CAS Learning Outcomes, as I will be taking on a challenge that I know will be incredibly difficult and testing for me but will hopefully allow me to develop a new strength in dancing in order to support the cause of Kahaani and raise money for the children in Kolkata our GC work so hard to support and raise awareness towards the global issue of the marginalization of those with disabilities around the world.

Our rehearsals take place every Monday lunchtime, for 45 minutes each. Here is a clip from our second rehearsal:

Project Manager for AMK MINDS

tanej8613@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg AMK MINDS 0 Comment

This week I had the chance to take on the role of project manager for our session AMK MINDS. The responsibilities of the project manager include organizing activities for us to perform with the clients there as well as ensuring that all the required materials are present and ready to take with us on our journey there. I decided to organize a coloring session, as I felt that coloring is a great way for the clients to do an activity that challenges their co-ordination and creativity, as well as simply being a fun activity that I knew they would enjoy. I printed out several coloring pages for the clients so that they would be able to choose which they would most like to do, as well as collecting several boxes of color pencils from the service office. It was the first time I had taken on a leadership role in the group, and before doing so I had little awareness of the initiative and commitment it takes to properly organise a session. For this reason I feel that this experience relates to the Second CAS Learning Outcome, as this responsibility ended up being a greater challenge than I initially expected, in order to ensure that everything runs smoothly throughout the sessions and that the clients could actually enjoy and benefit from the experience. I have never been very strong with my organisational skills, particularly with all the additional academic pressures that have come this year, yet motivation to create a good experience for the clients whom we have grown closer and closer to as the weeks have gone encouraged me to organise everything in a timely manner, allowing me to develop a new strength.

 

Kahaani Planning

tanej8613@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg Kolkata GC 0 Comment

This year has been my second year participating in Kolkata GC, a global concern aiming to raise awareness and funds for the ‘Voice of World’ NGO in Kolkata, India. Voice of World aims to help those who suffer from disabilities, in particular seeing impairments, and as a result create universal peace and harmony. While the GC organizes various fundraisers and events throughout the year in the name of Voice of World, our main annual event that we focus a lot of our efforts into due to its continued success is the Kahaani dance show. The word ‘kahaani’ translates to ‘story’ from Hindi and that is exactly what it aims to do, telling a story about the lives of those with disabilities in a country as diverse and unique as India. The event includes a variety of traditional dances organised and led entirely by students. For last year’s Kahaani, the theme of the show was the Indian festivals. Each dance specifically highlighted one Indian festival, with some of the dancers wearing a blindfold to show that those with disabilities are just as capable of expressing themselves through art and dance as those without.

By the time I joined the GC last year, the theme and its dances had already been decided. This year I have had the chance to be actively involved in the planning process from the start, allowing me to fully perform the 3rd CAS Learning Outcome for the very first time. Given the success Kahaani has had for so many years, it was difficult to think of an original theme that would compare to the creativity of those used in the past. Eventually it came down to a decision between two potential themes: dances related to each of the five senses, or having the entire show structured like an interview in which a person with disabilities communicates the story of their life. There were challenges with both options. While we had some really exciting ideas for the ‘senses’ theme, some of them such as taste and smell would be very challenging to pull off, especially given our shortage of resources. The interview option was also interesting, but would definitely require a lot more effort in order to compose and interesting and coherent script, whereas in past years the only speaking that took place were the introductions and background information for the dances themselves. In the end, we decided to choose the ‘interview’ theme. I was very happy with this decision, for I felt it best justified the idea of Kahaani being a story rather than just a series of dances.

While we have yet to plan out any of the specifics besides the theme itself, I am excited to see what ideas others come up with in future weeks, especially those who are more experienced from participating in the planning for previous years.

AMK MINDS- First meeting with clients

tanej8613@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg AMK MINDS, Uncategorized 0 Comment

AMK MINDS, or the Movement for the Intellectually Disabled in Singapore, is a local service offered to us by the school located in the organisation’s centre in Ang Mo Kio. I have had a lot of experience working with those with intellectual disabilities, as I have been volunteering at the ward for special needs children every week for the past few months. I have really enjoyed this experience and grown to deeply care for the cause of the marginalization of those with special needs. It was this, and a sense of curiosity given that I have never worked with intellectually disabled adults before, that motivated me to sign up for this service.

Sessions take place every Tuesday from 3-5 p.m., although due to the lengthy travel time, we usually spend no longer than 45 minutes to an hour at the centre. The overall objective of the service is to not only improve the motor and social skills of our clients, but also provide them with company, exposure to an interactive environment and simply allow them to have fun. Some of the activities we intended to perform with them are drumming, allowing them to familiarise themselves with different patterns and sounds, as well as coloring. We hope to include some additional activities in the future.

In previous weeks, we had focused each meeting on planning some of the activities we could conduct with our clients at AMK MINDS, and some essential agreements regarding our commitment to the service and our behaviour during sessions. This week we had the chance to meet the clients themselves, traveling to Ang Mo Kio as a group for the first time. Here, we met one of the heads of the Ang Mo Kio branch and updated him on some of the ideas for the sessions that we had come up with. He received all of our ideas very positively. Besides the organisation of the meetings, we were informed of some of the challenges we may face in our meetings throughout the year. As our clients bear a range of intellectual disabilities that affect them in different ways and to varied degrees, it would be possible that we would have a hard time really connecting to some of them and our interactions may not be entirely positive. He warned us that not all of them are familiar with the concept of acceptable social behaviour, which could lead to some potentially uncomfortable situations.

I hope that through the 1st and 4th CAS Learning Outcomes I will be able to overcome these initial challenges, as I will have to persevere through potentially uncomfortable situations. As a result of this, I hope to develop new strengths such as patience and empathy, both of which I have found equally challenging yet important in my work with special needs children as well.

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