11 weeks of Online Volunteering – dealing with COVID-19
We started the online volunteering on 17th March, eleven weeks ago. Neither of us thought it actually could bound us with the kids this deeply. We have prepared our activities every Monday, to become more efficient and raise awareness of the children and their capabilities. Afterwards, we had activities every Thursday and Friday. Due to differences in activities and not boring the children, we planned them according to demand, and we did two activities each day, respectively. It was also essential to provide their activities in order to create an interactive way of learning. 29th May is the International Day of UN Peacekeepers. Therefore, for the 11th week, we decided to have activities related to peace.
On Thursday, our Romanian student Anca prepared a handcraft activity on how to make flowers from paper. It was quite difficult for other participants, whereas doing handcraft activity is harder online while watching someone doing from the screen. Even though it was hard, our participants didn’t give up and gave all their attention to success. In the end, we had very nice results as it is shown below on the photos. Ecem organized the following activity on Thursday, and it was making a paper dove from origami. Again the only difficulty we had there was the due to screen and handcraft. However, the participants liked doing the origami dove. After the origami, they prepared a little poster of what they understand byword ‘peace’.
The next day, we had two more activities that were related to peace again. Rym coordinated the first activity, which was ‘draw your symbol of peace’. During this activity, we used white and colourful papers to make an emoji or a symbol of peace. Even though we had the original symbol of peace, we wanted them to use their imagination, inspire from their environment and create their own symbol. After the symbol, the participants wrote their thoughts and description about what peace meant to them. The second activity was from Povilas, ‘tree of peace’. In this activity, participants created trees out of their handprints. After drawing a tree of peace, he asked participants about their opinions on peace and the necessity of it. Some of the participants preferred to draw, and others preferred to write their own thoughts. Last activity of Friday was supposed to be the Romanian dance, but our Romanian participant was not feeling good. Therefore, that activity has been suspended to next week.
Nowadays, the world is going the direction of hate, and everything that is not related to peace at all. The dominance of hate and discrimination is getting bigger above all the values we have so far. Peace, equality and respect are the values that we care/should care about the most. Everyone comes to the world with pure love and peace in their hearts. It is the society and the environment that has a massive effect on darkening these hearts. Therefore, this week we wanted to pay attention to peace and reminding everyone how important to have peace in both our hearts and lives.
Gul Ecem Cam – volunteer in the project BCV – Building communities through volunteering – funded by ERASMUS +