Gecko Inc. Finished

The first semester has ended and Gecko Inc. concluded its first semester of service with a very intense four hour long basketball tournement in which all 10 teams showed up and participted. With this, I must now think about what I would want to do for the next semester as I still have another 4 or so month (minus exams) to continue with a community service activity. I plan on applying to participate in either Gecko Inc., as this will allow me to continue developing my skills with photography, or Recycling, as this was a service activity that I had participated in previously at OSC. In terms of a more indepth reason as to why I want to join either of these two programs is because both have a impact on our community, though Recycling has a much more global impact than Gecko Inc. but it is however no more important than the other.

MY GOALS FOR THE FINAL SEMESTER
- Continue with Service acivity (either Gecko Inc. or Recycling)
- Continue developing my skill in photography, this directly connects to Service activity

Gecko Inc. -Update-

We had another successful community basketball session last Saturday and we are preparing for a tournament match to take place this week-end, Saturday the 10th. For the match, we have had our members on our Facebook page form teams of those they want to play with, this sorted itself out fairly quickly and we now have  six teams participating in the tournament. From what I understand, the tournament will be organized as a round-robin type of tournament as this is a simple well known way of organizing this type of sporting event.

For the past few week-ends I have used this event as an opportunity to enhance my photography skill. I don't normally have the time on the week-end to go out and take photo in Colombo so this type of event proved to be a great way for me to both pursue a personal interest of mine and assist in our CAS's community engagement. This has also helped me understand the many functions of my Nikon D-3100, whether it be by using a faster shutter speed or by taking continuous photographs. Another factor for why I have taken up a photographer role in this CAS as well is because, with the Facebook group, as the creator of the page, I can and have given any member of the the page admin powers so that they can update information and allow acces to new members when I have not already done so.

Exemplar photo...

Service: American Embassy Halloween Haunted House

For the past three years I have agreed to assist with the American Embassy's Haunted House project on Halloween. This has been a very fun activity as this is one of the few annual events which is done by the Embassy for its community. For every years, apart from this year, I have assisted in organizing and setting up each event (in 2009 I was actually in charge of making the house ready as well as participating in it, where as in 2010 and 2011 I had no direct leadership role and in 2011 I had not assisted in the make ready).

[insert picture here]

I have really enjoyed assisting with this activity as this has allowed me to develop my collaborative and leadership skills which has allowed me to develop more commitment toward activities which I agree to participate in.

Creativity

I have looked into how I will be able to show evidence of my choices for Creativity. For the video commentaries the easiest and most common way is to upload the videos straight to YouTube as it is the source of many other commentaries, some of which have inspired me to take my own initiative. For creating my own music I have found a website called SoundCloud.com which is a website where users can submit audio tracks and share it with others both on and off that website and I have planned on using music programs to create and record my music; software such as MixCraft and GarageBand. I have tutorial type books and CD's for playing both the guitar and piano which allows me to start on this right away and I will be able to record what ever I do with these programs.

Link to my SoundCloud.com profile

http://soundcloud.com/da-v-i-p

Gecko Inc. part II

We ran another successful event, raising around Rs. 8 thousand, on the 5th but where we were posed with some new complications. We had a total of around 50 people show up, which is nearing the total capacity that we can accommodate and is making slightly harder to keep track of what is exactly going on.

We have thought about establishing regulations in order to reduce the amount of people that turn up to the event; one being to increase the entrance fee from Rs. 50 to 100, another being to have our Facebook group members tell us before hand to whether or not they are coming so that we can tell the security guards to only allow those who have informed us on their planned attendance. We will hopefully decide on what approach we will take hopefully over the next two weeks.

As to what we will be raising money for, we have decided that we will be putting the money toward providing sports equipment for a local school that is need of such supplies.

Addressing the 'C' in the acronym 'CAS'

I have been struggling to find what it is I could do to show creativity but I have to some possible conclusions. I have thought that I could try and...

-create some of my own music on some of music software that I have had sitting around on my desktop

-maybe try and produce some video commentaries (I have a software that will allow me to do this)

-attempt to learn the guitar and relearn how to play the piano (I own both a guitar and piano)

-write my own poetry

Each of these ideas are things that I have tried to do over the past few years but had stopped for various reasons. I feel, however, that these will allow me to develop skills in areas that I have had little actual experience in and will also help me reduce the amount of stress I have been having recently, as a result of college applications and poor time management.

Gecko Inc. part I

The community service program which I have joined is known as Gecko Inc. This is the first year that this service has been held and we had come to the decision that our main objective for this service will be to organize and execute community basketball every Saturday from 2 till 4 pm and with an entry fee of 50 rupees, this is an event open to the OSC community, other schools and anyone who wants to play basketball. We have already run a successful trail run a few weeks ago, only open to the school community, in which we were able to understand how this event would run and to highlight any possible problems that we may encounter. My role in this group is to maintain as well as update our Gecko Inc. Facebook group to ensure that those who are interested and willing to come to play are kept up to date with everything. I am also my groups source for providing Gatorade refreshment, which are only available through the American Embassy. We are, however, still looking to determine how we will use the profit we make from the events, minus the cost of refreshments, food, and the price for the referees.

The following is the link to the Gecko Inc. Community Basketball Facebook group....

http://www.facebook.com/groups/119500754820321/

Goals for the new school year!!!!!!!!

For this new school year I have created a new set of goals to try and achieve the criteria of CAS...

-I have joined the Gecko Inc. Service group, though we do not have the clearest goal set out for the year, we have decided that we will try and organise weekend sports activities for primary students. What this service will help me achieve is an understanding of the planning and organizing events, ethical implications of our service as well as initiating activities.

-I am still really looking for ways of showing Creativity which has proved to be quite difficult.

Reflection

I believe that I have been accomplishing most of my initial goals that I had step up at the beginning of the year. I had participated fully in the Dog Awareness Welfare Group service activity with good results but when it came to participating in the Library service activity there was a slight misunderstanding as to whether or not I was actually in the service which subsequently made me miss three sessions. I have been keeping up with my Action goals, though I have not updated it, I have found an archery range in Colombo which I plan to visit more next school year and scuba diving has possed quite a problem because I had planned on actually scuba diving in the second half of Grade 11 but my time management skills had deminished causing me to spend most of my weekends working on school work. Starting Grade 12 I have to focus heavily on Creativity because I had not done anything for it thhis year as I could not find anything to do. One also highly significant thing that I must do is to continously update my CAS blog because at the rate this year has been going I have been updating my blog once a month.

New Things for Creativity

After the eventfull Week Without Walls i had recieved a
brand new quitar. I plan on find either a program or
person to help me further advance my skill of using a
guitar... which really means I need someone to teach
me the absolute basics of guitar use. Hopefully my guitar
will not start collecting dust like my golf clubs.

Week Without Walls

On the 24th to 28th our grade set out on our WWW (Week
Without Walls) trip. What we intend to do on this trip is to
work on one of two schools (the grade was divided into two
groups each with a respective school) by repainting the
school, as well as outdoor equipment and while also
keeping the kids entertained for the first hour we are at the
school each day as well as to put on a concert on our
second day of work upon completion.The purpose of our
trip was not only to help repaint and give supplies to the
schools we worked on but also to develop
ourselves whether it be by...

1) Taking up a leadership role (this can be seen because
I had taken up a co-op leadership role to produce a skit
to play during the concert)

2) Working corroboratively with others (during the first
and second day of painting, I worked rather well with
others to complete this task)

3) Learning new skills (nothing during the actual school
work can really be considered a new skill)

4) Engage with issues of global importance (this was
achieved by our work on the school because the school
was set up as a source of education for childern after the
2004 tsunami)

5) Consider the ethical implications of our actions (by
giving these childern a clean environment to learn during
very crucial years of eductaion)

6) Undertake new challenges (repainting the school was a
skill which I had already obtained over previous years but
this year we had achieved alot more in a shorter amount
of time)

D.A.W.G. Sterilization & Vaccination Day

We held the actual sterilization event on Friday the 27 of November from 8am till 2pm. We were given 3 different times from which we could choose, either from 8-10, 10-12, or 12-2, I had chosen to be there from 10-12. The overall event went very well as we had received a large turn out of people with cats or dogs and by the end of the event we had vaccinated and/or sterilized a total of 62 cats and dogs. The only sad side of this is that this is the end of the activity for this year so i will need to search for something else.