GVI.2014.2

Monthly Achievement Report Quepos December 2015. Christmas camp fun for the communities in Cocal and Roncador.

Objective One of the important long term objectives for the Quepos community project is to encourage school attendances by enriching educational environments through the introduction of new resources, extra-curricular offerings and interactive learning. We seek to stimulate and provide opportunities to discover individual potential and increase self-esteem through exposure to new skills and activities. Another objective is to increase the awareness and understanding within our volunteers of the chal-lenges faced by different educational institutions.

Summary GVI Quepos provided a two week Christmas camp to two of our communities that they felt that would benefit from extracurricular offerings during the first part of Christmas holidays. Through a variety of activities that included arts, science, and sporting activities, we were able to give these students oppor-tunities to have fun as well as working within a group.

Report

Volunteers and staff were asked to plan a two week Christmas camp for the first two weeks of De-cember as the schools had broken up at the end of November. The first week of Christmas camp was at the Cocal commu-nity and the second was in the Roncador commu-nity. Volunteers and staff began planning the camp the week before, extra planning sessions were done before and after teaching classes with a

budget set for buying the materials needed for the activities. In order to enrich and give students the best opportunity to learn and have fun in the camp, the student were split into two groups. One group catering for the younger students and the other group for the older ones. Science activities that were made fun such as making volcano using sodium bicar-bonate/vinegar were done on the beach so the students could work together and interact better by making the volcano from beach sand. GVI also provided art and craft classes throughout the week to students to give students opportunities to be creative as well as gain new skills in arts as it is not part of the national curriculum. The community in Cocal is a very poor community that faces many daily challenges such as drug and alcohol use which most of the kids will see either in their life at home or within the community usually on a daily basis. During holiday time the children from the school in Cocal often will have no after school activities planned or have any holiday camps planned for them either. GVI was able to take this opportunity to not only provide the children in the Cocal community a week of fun supervision but also to highlight and show the volunteers the difficulties this community faces. Throughout the week the volunteers had the opportunity to have lunch cooked for them by a local person in their own house. This gave the volunteers an awareness of firstly how local people in Cocal live but also an awareness of how challenging life in Cocal can be. It was also an opportunity for GVI to directly pay someone locally to make that lunch so it benefited the family directly.

GVI.2014.2

The second week saw GVI putting on a similar Christmas camp in Roncador school. The camp had similar activities planned which all went really well and the children re-sponded well and re-ally engaged in them especially the art and craft activities. Camp was done on Monday and Tuesday. One of the activities done was for children to make piggy banks us-ing used plastic drink bottles and then decorating them after, this was done in the hope it would not only increase self esteem but also promote the idea of saving money. The volunteers attended on Wednes-day to participate in the ‘celebration of happiness’ day which some schools run at the end of the year. The following day saw the staff and volunteers attend graduation day to support the students. These two days allowed the volunteers more exposure of how the community in Roncador comes together with the school often the focus of the community. It was very apparent the differences in the two com-munities after these two weeks. Volunteers were able to see the differences in the behavior of the children from Cocal and Roncador. An example been in Cocal (which is the poorer of the two commu-nities) students would usually be more aggressive when playing sports and also shout out ‘me’ ‘me’ when we were handing out art/craft and prizes, where as in Roncador the children often waited and got in line and when doing arts it was noted that the older ones would help the younger children. It is important to note that all children are very different and some students in Cocal were very considerate towards the others and showed great promise in team working so this observation is merely a general-ization of what was observed during the camp. Overall the camp days have given students opportunities to show their creative side and develop those skills including teamwork which we noticed throughout the week that this did help to develop self-es-teem. It also gave the volunteers an insight into the difficulties these communities face including social and educational problems.