All 40 of the volunteers are split into groups of about 5 or 6 and live in different villages. Each group was required to design and implement a community project. It serves as more of a practice on how to build relationships, plan and work with Albanians, and assess resources available. Our group decided that sense we had classes in the high school everyday, but had little opportunity to speak with the students that we should include them into our project. Also, one of the volunteers' host father is the director of the hospital. So naturally we wanted to utilize that resource. We were "planning" on having the director of the hospital come to the school and speak for 10-15 minutes about being healthy/exercise/pollution etc. then follow it up with a field day which would include several American games. ( the egg toss, 3-legged race, and the bat spin relay.)
We thought we had communicated that we wanted 12 students from each grade to participate in the competition, but unfortunately instead of having around 50 students show up we had around 300. There were far too many people for the director to speak and it was very difficult to keep them all out of the way when we wanted to have the games. However, I'm not sure the kids have ever had an event like that planned for them because everyone wanted to be in it and I think everyone had a great time. It was definitely nice to finally interact with the kids who had been so curious about us for so long.
2 comments:
That sounds awesome Mike, maybe you guys started something with the field day thing. Do they have art classes or music classes, maybe you guys could do a public mural or a small concert for the community with the kids next. If you do something with them again that is. Keep having fun, take tons of pictures.
-Dan
Really, though, you should start inventing games. Like Calvinball. Or that one we used to play with a raquetball and the garage door until the parents started yelling at us about the blue marks on the house.
Of course, you can plan a pretty picnic, but you can't predict the weather, but I bet the smiles on the little kids' faces and how excited they were definately proved that just because things didn't go exactly as planned doesn't mean that they were a failure at all.
Keep making things happen,
Aaron
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