Well, before I begin, I just remembered a dream which I dreamt about around five years ago when I was 13. At that time, I still could not remember how many people I was travelling with, but we were travelling in a vehicle, something like a van, but it had horizontal windows running along its sides. The rear was exposed and there were no safeguards to prevent passengers from falling out. I was standing at the rear, after managing to run after it and jump on board. We were travelling through a mountainous region on a two-way passageway, with little traffic regulations in place. Come to think of it, that dream came through as well! Although I can't relate it to exactly any actual incidents we did over there, I am sure that we did visit the city in the dream on such a vehicle. If I'm not wrong, the vehicle is a jeepney.
Ok, here we go, for the fourth day. I can't really remember much about the exact order of activities that happened at the school, so I'll just post what I do remember up here. For days four to six, the reflections posted here were only briefly included in the report to suit the maximum number of pages allowed.
The fourth day was the first day of our three day visit to Candau-ay Elementary School. We took a 15 minute walk down to the school, which was a stone’s throw away from the centre. As there were no high rise buildings in the area, we felt the full effects of the blazing sun. There was also no wind to reduce the heat that we felt. We were greeted by many children who were waiting at the gates for us. Everyone settled down, and in our facilitator groups of 2 to 3, allocated 3 to 4 students to a group. My group consisted of 4 facilitators and three students. The facilitators were Yiting and Grace from NJC as well as Samuel and myself from NP. Samuel joined us on the second day when Grace fell ill. The students were Mierco, Dellwen and Ivan.
Soon after, Joey led everyone in the warm up, and we played games to break the ice. There was a short presentation by Violet, Xing Dan, Nisha and Li Chen on Singapore, Japan, India and China respectively. The presentation was aimed at getting the students to know more about their neighbour countries and the region. The children were very attentive and were very interested to know more about the world that they lived in. As there was much time left, we invited the children to take us on a short tour of the school compound. We played more games and found out more about them before going back to the centre for lunch. After lunch, we headed back to the school for more activities. We had a Spelling Bee contest, where the class was broken into four groups, and a representative was sent by each group during the group’s turn to spell a word. That was followed by an activity where students and facilitators each had a piece of paper on our backs, and others went around writing good comments on the pieces of paper. The purpose of the activity was to increase the self confidence of not only the children, but the self confidence of the facilitators as well. Following that, there was an origami session for the students. Gerald’s group came up with the idea of folding paper planes and having a flying competition, to compare whose paper plane could land the furthest. In the evening, everyone concluded the first day, and we returned to the centre.
While preparing for our dinner, we noticed a large fire at a farm near the centre, and as we heard dogs barking, we initially thought that it was an emergency, and went to inform Mr Saceda, who told us it was nothing to be alarmed about, as it was normal to see large fires in the evening. Although we ended up laughing at a false alarm set off by us, we were glad that we were alert and observant of our surroundings. We still had the “Kampong Spirit” that is slowly becoming extinct in Singapore.
We realized during our planning for the second day’s activities, that things did not go very well according to plan that day. There were too few activities to last at least two hours for each session, which had us thinking on our feet after completing the day’s activities before the day ended. For the next day, we planned to have only one session for our activities, so as to make time for our final rehearsal for the Cultural Night performance.
Later that evening after we were done with our planning for the lessons for the second day at the school, we went on with our second attempt for the camp fire. This time, we invited the farmer who started the fire we saw earlier to help us in the setting up of our campfire. As expected, he did not even use half of the bottle of kerosene to start the fire! When we started the fire, it was a burning success! We managed to keep it burning 10 minutes before our rehearsal, up till the end of it! It was a night filled with success. The final plans for the Cultural Night were confirmed and rehearsals got into full swing that evening. Due to time constraints, we decided to do away with the skit, and instead, perform 4 songs. We would also be putting up a short fashion show of the ethnic costumes of the Chinese, Malays as well as the Indians in Singapore. As for the finale item, we would be performing a dance item, choreographed by students from NJC. The rehearsals went well that evening, and we managed to get ourselves more familiarized with the songs and the order of items we would perform on the stage the following evening. I have never felt so great during our trip, where I experienced for the first time during the trip, that the NJC and NP teams had truly become one with one another during that night alone. Although we were all tired to the point of falling asleep, there was pure cooperation among the members, nothing like what we experienced back during our past meetings and briefings.
Last night watched the movie August Rush after finishing the previous post. it was a great movie, so great that although at first it seemed to be like a movie inspired from a true story, but as you approached the last scene where the chracter August Rush composed his piece, it seemed more of a fairytale. The music was not very original, and part of it was from a piece composed by a famous composer. After doing some reflections, the perspectives people see music can be observed from the movie, without a doubt. Not to spoil things too much for those who have not watched the movie, the movie is filled with coincidences,where one coincidence would lead to another, bringing the whole story to a short, but disappointing close. I prefer clear-cut endings compared to endings that end half-way, leaving the audience to ponder about what happened next. Two more days before we're done with the module. oh, and I guess I better get to sleep soon so that I can wake in time to go for my first ever morning run alone, at 6.45am, maybe earlier at 6.15am. It's part of my training to wake early for school, as lately I have been waking at around 10 to 11am, even with 3 alarm clocks working to wake me up.
Once it's Sunday, I'm going to spend time to update the music piece(might leave the current one there) as well as the links list.
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