You reap what you sow

As most of you are aware of the factual saying, “You reap what you sow.” I thought it was quite fitting to start off the third week of November at GVI Kerala (India) with it. At GVI Kerala this is our moto because quite simply, the more time and effort you invest in volunteering on this diverse project, the more you get out of it. I am currently the second Sports Teacher here, working alongside Stefan and another Sports teacher, Rob, who arrived last Saturday (19^th November). Today it is the 23^rd of November and we are mid-week, the hardest and most intense part of the week has passed.

Two weeks ago we successfully carried out the highly anticipated Sports Day for the Manipur children where we had around 25 children split up into teams of two, accomplishing a huge variety of challenges and fun games to see who would come first, second and third place. A lot of preparation was put into it and it was a great success as the kids enjoyed themselves thoroughly. The reason for this Sports Day being that a few weeks ago Stefan and Coach had organized an even larger Sports Day for a large portion of the children at Auxilium School and we wanted to have the children from Manipur to experience this joy of being part of something big.

As the Sports Teachers never truly sleep, we continued this weekly tradition of large activities and decided to have the Manipur Boys try-out for the A-Team which is currently Auxilium School’s Football Team, in an effort to make them feel like they are part of the bigger picture so that they are motivated even further to do well in the sports that they enjoy so much. The try-outs worked perfectly, we chose 5 children out of the 11 to add to the A-Team which already consisted of 14 players, summing up to be a total of 19 children in the A-Team.

We encouraged the other children to keep working on their skills as we would have further try-outs in the future to keep the competition and advancements going so that they also have a goal to work towards when not in the classroom studying/learning. As a Sports Teacher, you might not expect to see much of the text-book education side apart from Sports Tuition on Tuesdays and Thursdays, this is not the case however, as there are times when assistance is required by the other teachers that work incredibly hard to further the development of the children’s skills in all the basic subjects of any school. This week Stefan and I are going to be helping out with some teaching which will be a welcomed challenge whilst Rob, the newly arrived Sports Teacher, will continue working with the children on Sports every day. We hope to make a start on some of our ambitions to improve life with Sports in Auxilium this week as we will be heading out to buy some more equipment and hopefully start building a fence around the rubbish area near the football field (which is temporarily closed because of my banana feet :S) and get started on cleaning the place up a bit.

Hard work as it is, the smiles are what you do it for and they are always there!! :D

Coen

You reap what you sow