A few months ago, we shared a little bit about our sister Katie's Ireland adventure. Katie spent her summer interning at the West Sligo Family Resource Center in Enniscrone. This past week she helped at a children's camp as a part of the internship. Here's what she has to say:
This Monday through Wednesday, the organization I am interning for put on a children’s camp for the surrounding communities. The town I am working in, Enniscrone, is a small town surrounded by many other small towns so this camp attracted children from all over the county. We decided to plan activities focused on math and science because the government is really pushing organizations to figure out ways to get children involved in those subjects across the country. Ireland is at the very edge of the western part of Europe and thus attracts business from countries west of Europe. There has recently been a huge influx of technology and science-based companies finding homes in Ireland but there is a shortage of Irish employees for these new businesses to hire which is why the government wants to get kids interested in the subjects of math and science. It was also very important for the family resource centre I work at to get children interested in those subjects because there is a really high poverty rate in and around Enniscrone. It is a very rural and agriculturally-based area that doesn’t get a lot of attention. The idea is that if we can get these children interested in science and math then they can slowly work their way out of the cycle of poverty by gaining employment in the math and technology sectors where the pay is usually higher.
Each day we had an activity in the morning and an activity in the afternoon. On Monday we had “fun math” in the morning and built Lego Technic models in the afternoon. On Tuesday we painted signs for the Tidy Towns initiative in the morning. The kids each got to paint their own sign and got to put a friendly reminder on it about not littering and keeping the community clean. My favorites were “put it in the can, man” and the creative “throw rubbish away so birds don’t choke and die.” Well, it’s true! ;) The signs will go up around Dromore West which is the village where the camp was held. The kids were so excited that their signs would be up for the whole town to see. In the afternoon we did jewelry making which I was afraid the boys wouldn’t like, but all kids made at least one bracelet and one boy even made five! On Wednesday in the morning the kids did “outdoor skills” where we took them to the football pitch and they learned some football (soccer) skills. Then in the afternoon they decorated cupcakes which they all enjoyed so much they ate most of them instead of taking them home to show their parents.
I have been doing this internship for seven weeks now and this camp was definitely one of my favorite things I’ve done. It didn’t seem like much but even just getting them familiar with ways that math can be fun or teaching them how to build robots out of Legos is helping them- introducing them to things they never thought could be fun and making them enjoyable. Maybe not all of them enjoy math and science but hopefully we changed at least one kid’s mind about the subjects. All of the kids said they wanted to come back for another camp and the resource centre is already planning a Halloween camp and was just given a grant to fund doing just that.
This internship has been such a blessing- it has taught me how to make a non-profit organization run from all aspects which is exactly what I plan on doing with my life. I am very grateful to have had this opportunity but I can’t wait to get back to my AOII sisters and family in Nebraska in just 15 days!
0 comments:
Post a Comment