Only a week left to our trip! OSL has been actively preparing for the trip – we’ve had many CXC (cultural exchange, which will be performed for the Cambodians towards the end of our trip) dance practices after school over the past 2 weeks and each comm has been busy getting ready as well.

For CXC practices, we are split into 3 groups, each doing a different dance. We have a Chinese dance, Malay dance, and Hip hop! All were choreographed by our very own CXC comm. The CXC practices were tiring but fun! We had to keep doing our steps over and over to get them. Everyone tried very hard to familiarize themselves with the steps so that we could go home to practice some more. Thanks to our CXC comm for being so patient in teaching us the steps :)

The trip is getting closer and closer – are you feeling the excitement?? :)

On 15 Oct, our team had a cooking course conducted by the Aesthetics department in our school. This was so that we could learn to cook simple dishes with ingredients found in Cambodia. During our trip, we will be preparing all our meals by ourselves, so this course was really very important!

This is how we split up the work:

Team 1 – vegetable curry, couscous and green bean dessert

Team 2 – peanut porridge, stir-fried vegetables and sweet-potato dessert

Team 3 – vegetarian bee hoon, bee hoon soup and barley with sago dessert

We had a lot of fun learning to cook these dishes, and everyone got to bring home some of the mouth-watering food that they cooked. We would very much like to thank the Aesthetics teachers for taking the time to teach us :) We really appreciate it! and I must say, our teacher’s recipes are really good :D

Last Friday (23 Oct), we had our Parent’s Meet, held in school! This was exciting for us because it was an opportunity for us to present OSL to our parents and the committees that work together in this project, and also about the upcoming trip itself.

There was much to get ready for this important day, especially preparing what we were going to say to the parents and how to present it. There were also refreshments to be prepared (cooked by our own logs comm!), and pamphlets to be made which would be given to the parents. We also received one of our t-shirts in advance so that we could wear it with pride during the meet.

On the day of the meet itself, each comm gave a powerpoint presentation on their jobscope, what they had been doing since the beginning of the year, and what will be next. Mr Segarra also talked about our trip to Cambodia (which is in less than a month!), including accommodation, travel plans, itinery, safety precautions and what to expect. After that, we had a Q&A session for our parents to clarify whatever doubts they had. Finally, Mrs Julie Hoo also stood up to talk about OSL and praised us for all our efforts, and encouraged us to do our best for the Cambodians :)

After refreshments, which turned out to be extremely delicious, we cleared up and went home with our parents. We hope that they are now more reassured and heartened with the knowledge we have very capable teacher-mentors, encouraging and caring mentors and a group of committed and enthusiastic members of OSL. :)

Sec 4 netcarn was a good learning experience for all of us. We started out the day well with everyone arriving on time and the drinks arriving on time, but as time went on things got a little messy. Firstly, the sales of bubble tea was not as good as we expected, and surprisingly, the 100plus actually sold faster than the bubble tea.

Learning point: During sports events people would rather buy something isotonic than something sweet, so we will order more 100plus for the subsequent netcarns.

That said, with the fact that we had too many bubble tea packets, coupled with the stress of our coming EYAs, we forgot the service part of this fundraising. We were a little impolite to the public causing us to accidentally ‘degrade’ our reputation. But with that said, we will definitely do better for the next fundraising event.

Learning point: Don’t lose focus of the fact that fundraising events are essentially a service to the public.

Teachers’ Day was fantastic!! Well of course we had fun with the performance and the class parties and all the gifts! But after all the fun, it was down to hardwork – car washing. But first, I would like to memtion that we did not forget giving the teachers gifts. We got together and made a nice card for all the teachers. :)

Back to car-washing. After the class parties we got together and set out in our teams. To the CLEANING + BEAUTIFYING jobs! Washing cars may be hard work, but it was really fun. We as a team get to splash/clean cars together and it doubly serves as a fundaising event and team bonding event.

Mr Segarra helped us too and Mr Mizar gave us a US$5 to wash his car. We were all shocked with the fact that Mr Mizar carried all sorts of currency, but Singapore dollers.

Oh and one more thing, this car wash was done at a discounted price, as it was Teachers’ Day. Instead of the usual 10 bucks per car, we did it for 6 dollers instead. All in all we had great fun and all. :)

On 19 August 2009, we celebrated World Humanitarian Day in school :)

World Humanitarian Day is a day to pay tribute to the brave humanitarian workers who devote their time and energy to come to the rescue of innocent victims of war/natural catastrophes across the world (for the first time in year 2009!). It will be celebrated throughout the world, and as RGS strongly encourages meaningful engagement in service to the community, WHD is an opportunity for us to highlight this. Hence, we used this day to raise awareness about what we do in OSL, as well as to commemorate the humanitarian spirit of all those humanitarian workers in the past and present.

We played 4 songs in the morning – Earth Song, Man In The Mirror, Send It On and Where Is The Love :) We also sold bubble tea during the recesses. This time, sales were much more organized, but we forgot to stock-take beforehand, which caused a lot of confusion. This was an oversight on our part, and we now realise how important stocktaking is.  But overall, fundraising for WHD was fun! Furthermore, through this, we hope to inspire our peers in school to participate in service-learning wholeheartedly. :)

For National Day celebrations in our school this year, OSL decided to add to the festive spirit by selling bubble tea (:

Bubble tea is, as always, an extremely hot favourite among RGS girls, so we sold out very quickly. But while it was a good thing that everyone was in high spirits and we managed to finish selling all our stock, there were several things we realised we needed to improve on.

Our main problem that day was that because of the large crowd and our lack of organization, the sales were very messy and appeared unprofessional. Having been in OSL for a several months already, this is something that should have been avoided! So during our debrief, we talked about striving for quality in our service instead of being preoccupied by the amount of bubble tea we sell, and we will apply this to all future fundraising events.

As part of our LSL, we decided to work with children because we felt that the experience would help us in Cambodia. We helped out at the Umar Pulavar Tamil Language Centre (working with SINDA) where we were assigned to do various tasks like visual screening, being teaching assistants, observing classes, crowd control, etc. It was fun there because the kids in the classrooms were mostly very enthusiastic and funny :D Some of us observed that the teacher was engaging and made the classes very lively, which is what we should aim to do in Cambodia (: We also learnt to handle rowdy kids and not let them walk all over us – something definitely important when teaching kids!

Even though we didn’t get to do much hands-on stuff with the kids, it was good helping out and getting to know our teammates better during our breaks (:

This year, as a way for us to practice giving instructions, facilitate lessons and learn some computer lingo, we taught IT skills to a group of elderly people at Bukit Merah CC! This gave us the experience of conducting lessons and helped us familiarise ourselves with any problems that students may face (which the elderly faced).

First, we went for a training session where we observed the CmPS group carry out the lesson. Then subsequently, it was time for us to conduct the lessons ourselves and interact with the elderly!

We learnt a lot from these sessions (: The first was how to deal with language barriers. The elderly people were mostly Chinese-educated, so we sometimes found it difficult to translate terms like attaching a file, etc. but we managed to communicate with them in broken english/poor chinese! It won’t be so easy when we go to Cambodia, though.

Another was to give more appropriate instructions (like taking note of who you are talking to), giving step-by-step directions and to be polite at all times! We also learnt that being friendly and encouraging puts a smile on the other person’s face so (: And that PATIENCE when teaching is key.

In terms of working with our team members, we had to try to work together to keep everyone on the same pace, and simple things like remembering to bring the laptop/helping each other out when we got stuck. All in all, it was a memorable experience for us, and it was very nice getting to meet such nice elderly people :)

Mural Painting was held on 24th, 25th and 26th June. We conducted it at Whispering Hearts FSC at the Love room. Before the three scheduled dates, a group of us went over to prepare the room for the big mission ahead (: Basically, we cleared the room of books and litter and traced out our designs on the wall with chalk.

On the three days, groups of us went down for about 7 hours each time on average. We had to line the floors with newspaper and paint the different drawings. Some of them required the usage of masking tape as we had to be careful not to draw outside the edges of the designs. A few talented ones among us also shaded some pictures to make them prettier and more presentable.

It was a joy helping to make the room more conducive for the children to have lessons there. We all did our best, and indeed made the love room a room full of love. <3