Dignity Foundation: My First Visit
Friday's are always the saving grace at the
end of a seemingly endless week of college life. It's like a long-awaited TV
episode you've been saving up, or a cheat meal after a whole week of rabbit food.
And the fact that Friday's are half days is just the cherry on top of the
ice-cream. However ever since 2014, TCSH Rotaractors have been dedicating their
Friday afternoons to the hallowed hallways and classrooms of Dignity
Foundation. Established to serve as a school for refugees, Dignity Foundation
provides a solid education for underprivileged children from pre-school level
up to secondary level, standing by the firm belief that education plays an
essential role in breaking the poverty cycle.
With the classroom filled with more than 60
exuberant kids - and that's just the pre-primary section, it's easy to see how
the teachers can be swamped at times. Which is why Dignity relies on not
help-tutor-once-a-year volunteers, but committed people who are willing to
extend their schooling hours for just a little while more each week to teach
the students in Dignity Foundation. And it's often that in the end, they end up
learning as much as the kids themselves.
It can be a little intimidating in the beginning,
when first you step through the doors of Dignity Foundation, where the words
'transforming the lives of the poor through education' are inscribed. While you
can hardly keep awake during class, yet here you are on the doorstep of
Dignity, a school where refugee children await your enthusiastic guidance
on the rocky road of education we know all too well.
You're immediately greeted with a babble of
noise when you enter the pre-primary classroom, a large area surprisingly
cleared of normal school desks, whiteboards and chairs one expects from a
school. Instead, there are large carpets on the floor and shelves around the
whole room filled with interactive learning tools like wooden alphabets,
colored objects and the like. And dotted everywhere in the classroom were more
than 60 sunflower-yellow attired children no higher than your elbow, doing a
variety of different things all related to education.
As we were in charge of reading, we were
quickly ushered to the reading corner which had a plethora of books, from
giant-sized to books to those reminiscent of our Peter & Jane days. The
children immediately crowd over excitedly, as we volunteers plopped down on the
carpet, books in hand. Having stopped reading aloud since seven, my reading
skills were probably more than a little rusty. However I don't think anyone
could have denied the eight pairs of inquisitive eyes waiting expectantly in
front of me. So I "trip trap trip trapped" through the 3 Billy goats
gruff, and huffed and puffed through the three little pigs, and I think it was
at the third book where I started to get braver. 'Hey look! What's this animal
called?' as I excitedly indicated the striped orange and white picture of a
curled up tomcat. When your question is greeted with blank silent stares you
start to sympathize with your own teachers back at TCSH. So this is what it's
like, you think as you nod sagely and pray for all of your teachers forgive
you.
In the beginning, you just smile and answer
your own questions, because who can blame them for being a little apprehensive
of meeting so many new people? Thankfully, persistence always pays off and
plowing through, the blank faces slowly but surely transform into enthusiastic
responses.
Such was the eagerness of one little boy in my
group, who broke the awkward silence by answering my questions:
"What sound does a cat make, guys?"
"Meow!"
"Dog?"
"Woof, woof!"
"Rabbit?"
Silence reassumed only to be broken by an
almost hopeful "…. meow?"
It was nice to see the children pestering the
Rotaractors to read their favorite books before they're even finished with the
the current one. Gradually, the more hesitant children go from shyly mouthing
the animals to actually voicing out, taking the lead from this especially
confident and tubby boy whose insistence on holding the other side of the book
made another little girl burst into tears. Oh the drama of preschool life.
The Tadika section of Dignity Foundation quite
a contrast to the hubbub of the pre-primary kids mostly due to the lesser
numbers. Here, instead of reading, the learning was more focused on self-exploration,
where adorable toddlers the height of your knee independently chose educational
tools from the shelf to play with on the mats. After a while of animal puzzles
and trying to help one boy realize that no, not all the rings were red in
color, Ms Tara the main teacher for Pre-school level called out for "ring
around the roses!" At her sign, the kids neatly kept away whatever they
were doing and padded over like little ducklings to hold hands around a furry
white carpet. In the time that followed, I learnt that besides the fact that my
nursery rhymes also needed some brushing up, the children looked hilariously
cute shaking their noses, waggling their eyes and bopping up and down to the
hokey pokey.
After an hour and a half of non-stop reading,
nursery rhymes, and "Walking in the Jungle" puppet shows, the
Rotaractors revealed that they were definitely getting on in the years, when
they ended up being utterly wiped out and exhausted by kids half their age.
Many of us volunteers shared much laughter in the van over the children's
various antics, be it from one boy who cried when Joe accidentally didn't read
his story book or when another child touchingly asked Jing Yi: "Are you
coming back tomorrow?"
Not only was it more than wonderful to join
the children in their world filled with Aesop fables, magical beans, magic
porridge pots, pandas and all other things fluffy, you can't help but feel a
bit more satisfied, more appreciative and just all warm and fuzzy inside when
you reply to them "Not tomorrow sadly, but see you next week!"
Written by,
Amanda Lee,
Rotaract Club TCSH.
