Working with the kids
“In the morning I woke up tired, but as soon as I got food into me, I was good to go. In the morning we travelled by ferry over to Masa Ati school. Once we got there, I started off tutoring the kids, of all ages. Tutoring was both interesting and mentally taxing for me. It’s fun trying to figure out how the student learns best, but the execution is a bit draining as it takes repetition of certain actions to get the idea across to the student due to the language barrier. After the tutoring we began doing crafts with the young students; making Christmas trees, mermaids, koalas, Christmas reindeers and paper baubles that were decorated. I was making Christmas trees with some of the kids; we decorated green paper trees with all sorts of materials and sparkly things. After creating the Christmas trees, I have concluded that I hate glitter as it had gotten everywhere and was almost impossible to remove.
When we got back to the vista, we ended the day with swimming at the beach, pizza and to top it off a small ice-cream Sunday.“
– Bernie
Building a classroom
“We all woke up tired at around 6:30am, to be ready for breakfast at 7:00am. We then all caught a ferry over to the Masa Ati School, where we were assigned roles. I was apart of the group building the new classroom, which will be used to teach Year 11s and 12s. The room is a rather odd design as it has a tree in the middle, but I like the idea. Throughout the very hot and humid day I did several jobs including measuring, cutting, digging and concreting. As I was working, an inquisitive bunch of the Masa kids started to help me measure up some of the beams needed to build the classroom. By lunch time the whole building team was hot, sweaty and tired, I think at this point we all probably wanted to go home and cool off. At around 3:00pm the teachers took most of the students back to the hotel and went swimming, however Jack Weary and I stayed back to help the teachers until 4:30 to finish up building for the day. When we arrived back at the hotel Jack, Mr Allsop and I went to the beach for a swim and watched the boats sail past the last part of the sunset. I had an eventful day and I enjoyed every part of it but … I’m still tired.”
– Solamon