Last Sunday, I joined Project Passion, a SL project group, to participate in a session with children with incarcerated parents. There were other volunteers from my school and from Nanyang as well. We arrived at a childcare centre, the gathering place for the children, at 9am and started preparing the logistics needed for the series of activities that we were conducting. A couple of the children arrived when we were almost done, so some of the us volunteers started communicating with them first. My first impression of them was no different from a child with a normal background. I completely forgot about their background because they behaved like any other child - playful and happy. There were, of course, children who were quieter or more shy, hence we tagged them to one of the volunteer as a close buddy so that they would be more willing to speak up.
We mainly focused on music for the day. We went through several activities like music culture quiz, storytelling from the mood of the music and the construction of instruments. I was in charge of hand-made shaker table. It was a great time interacting with the children. Some were a little sulky, but most of them were really enthusiastic.
The process of making the instrument was not difficult, but I managed to spend quite some time speaking to them. There were really sweet children, like Sri(:, who would engage the volunteers instead of us engaging them. Sri even included my name in her design on her instrument (even though she spelt it wrongly at first)!
It was quite a busy morning, but I thought I had not wasted my time. To me, this session was a period for me to break away from studies and technology. It was a time for me to interact with people, with children and I really enjoyed it. My biggest takeaway was from the children, because they taught me that one is not defined by its background but its character. I thought the Project Passion's aim was very meaningful as it wanted to ignite the passion in learning in their clients and also ignite the passion in serving in their volunteers.