Yay!

22:00 5 December 2008

Today I had one of the most touching and amazing experiences of my life in Kyrgyzstan so far. Apparently today was “International Day of Volunteerism” or something along those lines and we were encouraged to do an event in honor of the day. JICA headquarters also had been asking its volunteers to do something along the lines, so I decided with Saori to work with our leadership club (the one that I worked with choreography and their presentation on the Rayon with) and scheduled an event. The basic idea was to encourage our leadership club’s participants to engage in volunteer activities and we decided to lead by example. We scheduled an event at the village “Dietsky-Dom”, orphanage, to get to know the kids there and entertain them with the hopes that we can establish a further relationship between the orphanage and our club. The event was a great success as we participated in various activities with the children there like a clapping game, origami, singing, and a personal identification game. At the end of the session, we had the participants fill out questionnaires that will hopefully allow us to identify the needs of the residents there. In addition to seeing the impact of our presence on the kids there (which I believe was overwhelmingly positive- there was one child that was crutches bound due to some skeletal problem, but he was one of the most enthusiastic, friendly, and obviously pleased children there with us), the reaction of our club members was wonderful. They are high-school aged and it was incredible to see them get in a volunteer spirit, to the extent that one of the members was moved to tears as we left for the day.

After the event at the orphanage, unexpected to Saori and me, the children from the club held a Конкурс, a staged event with songs, recitations, dancing, and games, in our honor as volunteers. It was really sweet to hear what they said to us and the games we played were silly and fun. They also presented us with some small gifts and cards which were really cute and I have rarely felt so appreciated in my life. After the past few weeks, which have been a bit frustrating with my primary school assignment- more on that later perhaps- it was really good to feel so valued and tangibly appreciated. That club is a really choice group of students from here and I am really excited to be working with them in the future.