Let me see your funky gecko!

I was part of the SAISA basketball team this year and we came third! Because we had so many days off and different things that were happening, the trainings were all over the place, but we did manage to get ourselves together and we created a strong team. We got coached by the Sri Lankan national team coach and Mrs Ramberg came with us to Nepal as a second coach/chaperone.

The tournament was being held in Nepal which first of all had a very different climate, which made it harder to play. We had to be especially careful with the warming up because if you didn’t have your arms and legs covered there was a chance on pulling a muscle, which on SAISA really is the last thing you want to do. Secondly the capital Kathmandu was so different from Colombo and the culture was also pretty different, I noticed this when we got to go to the market before our semi-finals. My host family was incredibly nice, which really helped with feeling welcome.

We started the tournament incredibly well, we played well together and we won every match, but when we came to the semi-finals we lost to Bombay by one point, which really upset us, but in situations like this you win some and lose some, and you shouldn’t be too set back with the losses. So we played Dhaka in the consolation final and it was a nerve wracking game because Alice was injured so I had to play the entire time which I had not done yet, but it went really well and we won! I really got to know all the people on the team which was really nice because most of them were people that I wouldn’t really talk to in school.

Our flight back got cancelled due to fog both in Delhi and Kathmandu so we had to find a new flight, which with 12 people travelling was pretty difficult, but after 5 hours of waiting we found a flight that could take us back. The only problem was that we had to wait in Bombay for 9(!) hours, which was killing because we were all really tired and we wanted to go home, but we survived and we returned home on Tuesday morning, more than 12 hours later than planned, but it was an amazing experience and I look forward to next year’s SAISA!

WWW Hanbantota!

For this year’s Week Without Walls we went down to Hanbantota to paint and interact with children at two of the local schools that OsC set up after the tsunami. We split up into two different groups; the CHA group (11.1) and the CHI group (11.2) because there were two different schools. To prepare our trip we got together gift bags for the children and we planned out how much paint we needed and what the murals were going to be. Seeing it after, it might have been better if we did a bit more planning because on the day we went to the school we realized that we could have done a lot more, because the school didn’t really need painting, but they did need equipment such as white board, tables and books for the children.

My goals for WWW –  

·         Work together with people I wouldn’t normally work with.

·         Provide my complete service to what we have to do.

·         Interact with local people, which will provide me with a new experience.

·         Have fun in everything we’re doing.

·         Keep up a good reflection journal because it is part of the IB requirements and this was the perfect opportunity for service work.

Service day 1 –

As soon as we arrived at the school we introduced ourselves to make the children feel a little more comfortable and it was also a learning experience for the non-Sinhalese speakers because we learnt how to say my name is;

My name is Stephanie – Mage Nama Stephanie

We played with the kids, and Skylor was the leader of that and we played duck duck goose and we demonstrated head shoulders knees and toes. This really made me realize how different our situations are and how happy our visits made then, although they were a bit scared at first.

The kids left early which gave us time to look at what had to be done and we got started. We had allocated different groups to do different things such as the mural, maintenance and the equipment. Because I was part of the group that played with the kids I did a little bit of everything which I really enjoyed. At the end of the day we got quite a lot done and we were all pretty happy with what we had accomplished. In the evening we rehearsed for the concert we were planning on performing the next day. Here is what we were planning:

·         ‘Hey soul sister’ by Camie and Bharat

·         Head, shoulders, knees and toes by everyone 

·         A simple Sinhalese song by everyone

·         Skylor and Bharat playing the guitar.

The teachers at the school were very nice and they gave us coconuts and bananas and they were always making sure that we had everything we needed which again made me realize how much they appreciated what we were doing.

Service day 2

We had to finish everything that we wanted to today so we knew that we had to get together and work. We managed to finish everything on time when it started raining really hard but luckily all the paint managed to stay on everything. 

The children at the school had also prepared a concert for us and theirs was really nice with dancing, music and singing. It made me appreciate the effort they put into it and it also showed how different their idea of a concert is.

Yala National Park



On Thursday, the fourth day of Week without Walls we went on a safari to Yala. We had to get up at 4(!) in the morning and we drove one and a half hours to the park. What I really liked was that we got split up into groups with different people, again people that we wouldn’t really choose to go with if we had the choice, but it turned out to be really fun! Because our vehicle had a pulley system we went really deep into the forest and we only got stuck once, which was a pretty scary experience, but we had a very experienced driver so it was all good.

We managed to see two leopards one of which crossed the road directly in front of our jeep which was really exciting because often you hear about people that went all the way to Yala and didn’t see and leopard at all, and we were able to see two on such a close range. On the way back to the main gate our tire popped so we had to wait until another jeep came by and give us a spare tire, but it was all part of the experience. Because our jeep came back so late we didn’t have time to go to the temple to reflect on everything as we planned, so we went back to the hotel and just had free time for a while, which I found really good because we had woken up early and we were all still really tired from the visits to the schools. Later on in the afternoon we got together together and did some activities which gave us the opportunity to just have fun with our peers.

In the evening we had planned a musical evening but because we already had done a lot with music especially during the rehearsals for the concert we had put together for the school. But, the school managed to organize a DJ for us, which was really fun and we were all pretty surprised. Overall, WWW was once again a really good learning experience with plenty of opportunities to broaden your knowledge and experiences.

Football Event Crew!

This year’s SAISA football was hosted at OSC on the 4^th of December to the 6^th and of course, that these events need a lot of organization and help on the days itself. To provide my service I decided to help organize and run this event. I signed up for being in charge of publication and the organization of the awards ceremony, which ended up being a lot more because there was a significant more amount of work to do than expected, but it was still and incredibly fun experience!

Some of the things I had to do –

·         Look over the hosting program to make sure each athlete had a house to stay at.

·         Produce the game schedule for all the games.

·         Design and hang up different signs to help the athletes get to know their way around school.

·         Keep the score board up to date.

·         Distributed the tournament t-shirts and make sure everyone had the right size.

The days went by really fast and I feel that we all did a really good job in making the tournament successful, and I am definatly joining the event crew next year again.

Sterilization or Vaccination?

With all the money we collected over the first semester we organized a sterilization for dogs and cats, where the option of a vaccination was available too. As I mentioned before the aim of DAWG is to organize this event, but this year we managed to collect enough money in the first semester, so we decided to not waste another semester, but to organize it at the end of semester one. I was really proud that we could, because it does say something about the organization and team work we’ve done to get the money together. We advertised by hanging up posters in English, Sinhala and Tamil around the school area and on the day we had a tuk-tuk go around announcing it in the area, which I thought was pretty successful because that way people not only get to hear about it but they also got reminded about it on the day.

We had a group of vets come down from Kandy and we rented a hall in Battaramula, these were the major expenses, but without them we couldn’t do anything so we had no choice. We got plastic tables, chairs, newspapers and bins from the school to aid the vets in what they needed and we all signed up for a shift, although the leaders (Paul, Mo & I) had to be there the whole time. The sterilization went really successful! It was the best we’ve had so far because we managed to sterilize 54 dogs and cats and we gave 29 vaccines. There was a journalist from the Lanka Woman (LW) that took pictures and also wrote an article about the event this got published in the December edition but I’ll post up a scan!

Because this was the goal for the year and having two sterilization would be too much, we decided that we would not have DAWG in the second semester, we do though have plans for next year’s DAWG and we are planning to organize two sterilizations next year, one in November and the other in April, so fingers crossed that it’ll work.