We are delighted to share a blog submitted by Pavithra Liyanaarachchi, teacher at Sri Lankan School Muscat Oman who are part of a team delivering a Global Goals project for the 2018-19 Global Goals Competition.
Their project is among over 620 social action projects currently running as part of the GSL movement and we are excited to be supporting them to design and lead positive social change in their community.
On this great mission, addressing No Poverty and Quality Education became our prime motif when we realized that the brothers and sisters of our own school community are going through many obstacles that disrupt their education and ultimately, they become discouraged to come to school
Together We Can Do Great Things
We started our project Boundless Education (BE) in December 2018 after being registered as a participant of the Global Goals Competition realizing that we were supposed to address a few goals of Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations.
Whereas we wanted to blend and contribute our time, talents, efforts, creativity as the youngsters to let the world know that our voice and efforts can move mountains and be the change we wanted to make.
On this great mission, addressing No Poverty and Quality Education became our prime motif when we realized that the brothers and sisters of our own school community are going through many obstacles that disrupt their education and ultimately, they become discouraged to come to school. Therefore, we decided that some personal difficulties of our fellow colleagues should not be an issue for them to discontinue their education while we have the potential to do something about it.
It is with great pleasure we announce that Sri Lankan Airlines Oman has extended their fullest cooperation to us by being Our Official Commercial Partner and along with that many other sponsors have given their consent to join our project with a lot of praise on what we do to empower our colleagues.
Meantime, we conduct a peer learning programme every Sunday after school. The purpose of this programme is to give an extra support to the slow learners from grades 1-5 to improve their Math, English and Science. The participants as well as the parents have accepted this programme with a lot of enthusiasm. Nevertheless,we try to continue the peer learning programme steadily every week the 100% attendance of the participants those who are enrolled in the programme.
On the other hand, we also intend to start our book donation campaign very soon. This will be done with the collaboration of various partners in the education sector in Oman (e.g. schools, libraries, publishers etc.). encouraging our school community to read more is the intention of this programme. Along with this the donors can contribute stationery to us so that we could donate them to the students who have difficulties to afford stationery.
As a part of our fund raising program, two movie days along with two bake sales will also be conducted to raise funds for the sponsorship programme in the second and third weeks of February 2019. It will be organized in school and will be open for school student community.
Consequently, we believe that Social awareness and responsibility are crucial when the activism is concerned. We took part in the World Cancer Day Programme organized by Omani Cancer Association on the 4th February 2019 in forming a human ribbon in which we also joined hands with 2700 students of various cultural backgrounds, to raise and spread awareness about cancer among people. Click here to go to Facebook.
Nonetheless, ‘Boundless Education’ (BE) has now become a strong, active movement which is running successfully with the dedicated, collective effort of many kind hearts and well-wishers.
We would like to thank our Board of Directors for being our strength and we wouldn’t have come this far in our journey without the cooperation extended by our Principal Mrs.Nirmala Liyanage, Deputy Principal Cresent Jayawardene and Assistant Principal Janake Gunathilake along with the our teachers in charge Ms.Tharushi Wijethunga and Ms.Pavithra Liyanaarachchi.
Our Journey
When we enrolled ourselves in this competition for the first time, we had not realized the gravity of this and what impact we could make on the lives of others. Nor we had understood how capable and strong we are or what our potentials we behold. Thus, this journey has so far been very challenging and a great learning experience for all of us. One of the most important skills that we all have started to develop is accepting ourselves for who we are and not underestimating ourselves or our capacity. There are days that we are unable to reach our targets and someday we wind up the day with a massive contentment. Whatever the circumstances are we have realized that we need to keep going. We are much encouraged by all the successes and the failures that we gain in this project. At the same time, we believe in one step at a time. We cannot rush things or force things to happen. Activism takes time and it can drain our energy. Sometimes we feel at the end of the week we are so drained and tired but to think that we were able to complete a lot of work in the past week makes us feel extremely liberated and strong.
The Next Chapter
One fact we can prove from our humanitarian mission is, age is not a barrier to do better to the society. Our group consists of seven members who are just 12 and 13. The amount of work we have been able to do for the last one month is tremendous. We need our followers (youngsters) to know that age is just a number, and ‘where there is a will, there is a way’. The exposure we get through our project is immense and it teaches us a great deal on how we need to make an alliance with the organizations and the people in the society to make things happen and make things work. When we all work hand in hand to build our communities, it is possible to achieve the sustainable development goals or any other goal in our lives. We just need a great will, an open mind and the initiative.
The 2018-19 GSL Global Goals Competition is now open and runs until June 2019. If you belong to one of the 700+ teams of students currently delivering a social action project as part of the competition we would love to hear from you and feature your blog and project photos on our website to inspire others.
