Student Service Perspective

This week we encouraged participants to share their student perspective on the blog! This particiular post was written by Lauren Smith (right) and Ryleigh Durham (middle) who are both rising seniors and first time CIEE participants:

"Today we are going to talk about our experience at the day camp that we participated in all week. This day camp is though Acción Callejera and takes place in the community Rafey. Throughout the week, we spent the morning interacting with the children and playing games with them! Our service and leadership participants were split into 3 different groups who were each in charge of leading a day of games. This allowed us to take a leadership role in a situation that contained challenges like language barriers, maintaining kids attention, and thinking of good games that included little talking. For us, leading games each day let us interact with the group, learn what our strengths and weaknesses as leaders were, and capitalize on our strengths the rest of the week. Overall, it has been an exhausting but rewarding week of fun and smiles with these amazing kids!

The week of fun and games all led up to the big pool day on Friday that the kids look forward to all year. On Friday, we started off the morning by doing our usual dances and interactive games to get the kids excited for the day and engaged with the leader. After that, we split into small groups and were assigned a team color. Each camper and leader had a bandana of their team color and traveled from station to station and rotated through various games. I think we can speak for the group when we say that this camp has been one of the most amazing experiences that really allowed us to open our eyes and see a perspective of the world that some of us have never seen. Although the kids don’t have many worldly possessions, they never failed to greet us with a smile and hug every morning. For that very reason, Friday afternoon was a heavy hearted time when we had to wave goodbye to our buddies. What we did all week was worth the frustration and exhaustion because we know that these kids were granted the time to just be kids and enjoy their childhood. In addition, we gained new perspectives and leadership skills."