Wednesday, October 30, 2013

GAP YEAR

                                                                                                 
  My name is Mude. I am currently doing my Gap Year, which is a period between secondary and college. Been a secondary school graduate calls for great excitement of being a part of society and taking full time part in activities like community service. My community service started on a good note because Kucetekela Foundation had already established a literacy project through Abram in the Kalikiliki compound. The aim of this project is to provide an education to children with a desire to learn but do not have financial support to get them into school.

 As an intellectual with the desire to help others especially the needy, I decided to put in my very best interests to boost the project by offering my intelligence to teach young kids in the compound how to read and write. My journey from home to the project was long on foot, reaching there on time required me to work up very early in the morning, at times I would just feel like stopping the teaching, but thanks to KF who provided a bicycle which reduced my one hour walk to a twenty minutes ride.
 The kids at the literacy project where awesome! They gave me respect a well behaved student gives to his teachers. We shared a lot of great moments together, one very interesting moment was during sports time were we used sports to learn about HIV/AIDS, this activity was demonstrated by using a ball as the virus, so we made a big circle and the person having the virus had to stand in the middle of the circle, he or she had to throw the ball to anyone in the circle unexpectedly, if the ball was thrown to you, you had to kick it back to the middle, failure to which you had to stand in the middle with the virus. The major lesson in the activity was abstinence is better than cure.

 Each lesson I taught made an impact in helping the kids, assessment test where written every month to see how they are progressing and the results I obtained showed better improvement in writing and reading. Though faced with challenges at first, I am proud to say that my efforts to educate others paved the way to my interests.                                                                                                                
 My stay as a teacher at the Kalikiliki Literacy Project was ended due to my appointment as the KF intern on the first of October 2013. The feeling of being trusted, reliable and valued rang bells in my head, being an intern for an organization like KF meant a lot to me in the sense that only one intern was selected each year and that 2014 was my year for internship. However being an intern so far has engaged me in a lot of activities some of which are similar to the literacy project. Tutoring grade eights and nines was the first thing I did, the process of tutoring reminded me of the literacy project but this time I had no worries of teaching how to read and write.
 working In an office filled with connected people has enabled me to meet a lot of persons who have shared great knowledge about life experiences, Many of them have showed interests in working with NGOs and helping projects benefiting the communities.
 Been an intern is also exposing me to computer functioning and office management skills. The laptop and the internet entitled to the intern have helped me discover a lot of things I was missing out on, including new ways of staying in touch with friends in far places through emails.  One of my major goals as an intern is to build a strong reliable network in and out of KF. it would be a shame not to acknowledge the fact that being an intern is the most interesting and exciting thing that has happened to me in my Gap year. My hopes are to do my best not to disappoint the people who have put their trust and faith in me. Being a gap year requires me to attend gap year meetings which are held at the end of every month, the meetings are fun because they bring back all the memories we shared back in school, we also share gap year experiences which enable as to learn from each other, college and university talks are my favourite because they help me look into the future depending on career interests. Soon i will be applying to university and I would love to study something business related like production management and maybe in the near future advance my studies to electrical engineering. I am very happy to be the KF intern even as I look forward to getting into university next year.