WA State Special Olympics

I had the absolute privilege of being a volunteer carer at the WA State Special Olympics today at Fairbridge Village in Pinjarra The event officially begins with the opening ceremony held at 5pm tonight, and goes over the weekend. The Special Olympics held sporting games such as basketball, aquatics, equestrian, bocce, softball, cricket and ten pin bowling.

UWA reserved a few spots for students to volunteer and I was lucky enough to hear about it just in time to go along. We arrived in the morning and helped do a bit of setting up. When the athletes began to arrive, we showed some of the guys from the men's basketball team to their cabin and spent the day with them until their other carers came. 

I cannot begin to describe what an amazing day it was. I had so much fun hanging out with all the amazing athletes. They were so friendly and full of life! They were excited to be at the Olympics, and for a few of them it was their first time. I loved getting to know them and joking around with them. A lot of the guys that we spent the day with had an awesome sense of humour and the laughs were endless. 

One of the highlights of my day was the running of the Special Olympics torch. As we were driving home, we had to stop to let the runners pass. One of the guys we spent time with as holding the Special Olympics flag and was holding it up so proudly. When they came close, my fellow volunteers are I cheered his name and encouraged him on. You should have seen the look on his face :) He was SO happy! It was like pure joy. An absolutely gorgeous sight to see. It's moments like this that I feel so passionate about disability support and helping them do great things with their lives.

We were only volunteering for this afternoon rather than over the weekend, and it was actually quite sad to say farewell to the wonderful people we met. They have all left a special mark on my heart and I feel so lucky that I had the chance to be involved in such a great event. It's a shame I didn't get to see any of them participate in their events but I am hoping that next year I will be able to volunteer for the whole weekend :)

Look how happy he is :D The torch is being held by one of the girls in the basketball team :)

Gladys Newton School

Today I did some volunteering at Gladys Newton School, an education support school for children with disabilities. I didn't even know the school existed until just a couple of days ago when I called up to request a day to volunteer. I have only ever had experience working with younger children below the age of 8 and so when I was placed in one of the senior classes, it was a nice change to work with older teens. 

With everything in life, there were challenges during the day, but I honestly can't describe how beautiful these kids were. They were high functioning teens with intellectual and mild physical disabilities but that is the last thing I'd say to describe them. These students were friendly and all that their own unique and quirky personality. They truly were wonderful human beings and I feel so lucky to have had the chance to meet and interact with them. 

We did gardening activities today and we learnt how to plan potatoes. It was so great to see the students participating and learning the skills being taught to them today. I really got a lot of joy out of my volunteer work today. I hope that people are willing to put themselves out there in order to find what it is they're passionate about. 

Homework Centre

The St Vincent De Paul Society is amazing. I've been volunteering with the youth for a few years now and the experiences I've had going on some of the kids camps have changed me for the better. I recently signed up for a Vinnies program called Homework Centre where children come in and volunteers help them with their homework and then do some enrichment activities with the children. 

Today was my first time volunteering for Homework Centre and our activity was to make invisible ink out of lemon juice. The idea is that you use the lemon juice as ink and write a message on white paper. Put the paper up to a heat source and then the message will become visible. Genius stuff. Kids love it. The instructions from the website (here) said to use a lamp to heat up the paper. The lamp we had wasn't hot enough so we ended up using a sandwich press of all things. It did the job nicely though. If you have an iron handy that would work too. 

I love the notion of helping kids to reach their full potential. Don't give up on them. They need role models. 

UniMentor #2

My last post about the UniMentor program at UWA was just me attending the training session. Today I was actually assigned my 'mentees'. So another mentor and I were assigned 15 freshers who we would take on a tour of the uni for their orientation week. There was a nice mix of international and mature age students and those who came straight out of high school. All the students were so nice and it was great getting to know them all in the short 2 hours that we took them around campus. 

I told a few of the students about this blog of mine, to which one of them replied that it would be challenging to try and do something new each day. Well, too right he was. It's only February, and there are some days where I struggle to think of something new to do. But I like the challenge. And at the end of the year I will have so much to look back on and I'll know that not a single day was wasted because I'll have proof that something was done each day. 

Doing this UniMentor program really made me reminisce about what it was like for me to be a first year. There was so much information which we needed to tell all of the students, and it just makes me wonder how on earth I got through my first week of uni.

I wonder how my past self would react if I told her about the next four years she'd have to go through in order to get to where I am now. Maybe it doesn't matter how she'd react. All that matters is that I have no regrets :)

 

 

 

I love this song from the musical Hairspray. The lyrics "I know we've come so far, but we've got so far to go" seem kind of bittersweet. However, I truly do like a challenge. I know that even though the path I took to get to where I am today was a difficult one, and what lies ahead won't be easy either, it'll still be a different path. And different is good. Different will lead to more challenges and experiences and these will help me to grow.

UniMentor

For the past four years I haven't done much volunteer work for uni so I decided to change that when emails went around recruiting volunteers for a program called UniMentor. When you become a mentor, you are assigned freshers who you take around campus during orientation week answering questions and directing them to all the services that the university offers. The great thing about this program (or at least I think so anyways) is that you give out your email to the freshers so that they can ask you questions via email whenever they need some help figuring out uni life.

I was surprised to see so many people attend the training today, which is quite an encouraging thought. I even made some friends who I gave advice to about sitting the GAMSAT. The GAMSAT is the big scary 6 hour test which needs to be sat in order to apply for med. I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that it's a horrible. Completely horrible. But don't get me wrong, nothing good comes easy so anyone who's thinking of sitting it, don't give up if you find it difficult. Keep going, you'll get there :)