CAS Project - İzmir Trip, Helping a School

At 8-9 June, we went to İzmir for our CAS project, which we have planned to help a public school. İzmir Menemen Fatma Koşay Primary School have been lack of computers, projectors and some basic sport goods. My classmate Özde, which is the head of this organization planned this CAS project and offered us to contribute.

In this project we aimed to fulfill the requirements of creativity by teaching how to apply sophisticated art techniques, by teaching some activities such as several games and by teaching them how to dance. We try to “service” them by providing computers to encourage them to integrate with technology, before we went to meet with sponsors in order to convince them to supply us some computers. We aimed that if they contribute this event, they will have an opportunity to advertise their brand. We try to engage students with sports, for instance playing sports and extracurricular activities trying to fulfilling the requirements of action.

We formed some groups according to our own strengths, for instance I was in group of extracurricular activity and sports because I know that my ability is strength in terms of activities. Therefore, I identified myself as a good player and select my group as sports group. I try to join and contribute other groups such as dancing and painting in order to try myself and develop my areas of weaknesses.

We have executed 3 meetings with sponsors regularly in order to receive computers, but importantly, the organization progress, meetings with sponsors, informing our school community about the activity in order to collect donation, which all took nearly 7 months. We, as a group start from informing our school community. I personally design one of the creative eye-catchy posters and continued this progress by making announcements in classes.

When we arrive there, we first served foods to kids to make them happy. This was both the happiest and gloomiest part of the project because giving food and witnessing to their happiness is amazing. On the other hand, due to their economic conditions, it’s obvious that they can’t afford live prosperously. But providing prosperous conditions made us happy.

Besides pros, this project has some cons like every project. Our critical reflection and cross-questioning ourselves is a bit quite challenging. Comparing these kids with our childhood make us to realize our chance that we’ve been experiencing. Although we’re living in the same country, due to our different cultures and backgrounds we had some difficulties while we’re trying to communicate. Instructing and organizing kids, make them listen to us, being a leader forced us.

This project developed our skills of communication, organization and planning. We handled this event by demonstrating creativity, action and service, and also make students happy.