Day 3

Day 3 – Emily Bao

An emotional day. Productive too. A group of SBers started out sorting gift packs for the children which went very well as we ended up with extra. We went up to the school and opened up our programme with an ice-breaker with JinWoo doing a Taekwando exercise successfully [as expected], since some of them do a session of Taekwando everyday at 6 am, of which some joined us yesterday. Everyone was very energetic and hyped up with Jin Woo’s enthusiastic instructions and the students all did better than most of the SB group. It was slightly awkward for the girls as all wore skirts and couldn’t kick high.

Next up was one of the Health Education aspects, Nutrition for half of the kids and games including “What’s the time Mr. Yak”, “Musical Chairs” and “fruit salad” for the other. The activity was quite hectic, as we had lots of bibs and bobs of pictures of food for all our food pyramids and our group had to search for several of the missing pieces and use extras instead. As we had 6 or 7 in our group, we split up to teach small groups of children about the food pyramid. This was pretty effective, as it was easy to get them talking to us when we asked them to teach us about the names of the different foods in Nepalese. They clearly showed how knowledgeable they were of the food’s name in English. But it was hard for us to remember them and despite remaining patient with our obnoxious pronunciation skills; ultimately we were only able to remember the few that amused us, such as nuffins as ‘ice-cream’ and candy as ‘chocolat’.

However, what was the most memorable turned out to be the small game we played later to test their memory. Krystal stole the show and really got the kids involved in the game. She would run through what each food group was and what they did for our bodies, always encouraging and getting them to repeat the names after her, incorporating various Nepalese phrases to make them feel at ease. Needless to say, it worked like a charm..

Jewellery was the next arts and crafts activity for the day and that turned out also fairly smoothly, despite a mishap where we accidentally overlooked bag of beads and so decided to donate them to the outreach later. At the last minute, we also decided not to do bracelets, just necklaces because they were more fun to make. Many students cleverly transformed their necklaces into bracelets by folding it twice or three times. However, most of them didn’t take them off after we put them on for them, even when they performed their cultural dance for us.

The time passed by very quickly and we had little time to talk to each student and learn their names. We were also hindered at times when encountering deaf students, since we did not know how to work with them at all. As one of our colleagues pointed out, smile is a universal sign and each of them had a smile enough to power the whole of Hong Kong itself.

On our way back to the campsite, we came upon a pleasant surprise when we were told that home visits to a small number of the Nepalese students had been arranged for the whole group. In groups of 2 or 3, we went along to their homes. It was an amazing experience and we once again experienced the amazing depth of Nepalese hospitality and cordiality, as we were showered with sweet smiles, requests for photos, exchanging addresses and presents.

Clearly achieved was our goal of appreciating and understanding cultural differences.