[Photo of the Cambodia house-building coin bank / photo credit: Yujin Son]

Australian International School has a CCA (extra curricular activity) for building houses in Cambodia to help people who are unable to secure housing.

The students involved meet at lunch time every Tuesday to discuss ways that we can collect money at school.

The money we collect goes straight to Cambodia. In addition, we also have our own coin bank, which looks like a house in Cambodia, to gradually collect coins too.

In the first few weeks, we came up with some ideas under a larger theme. Many students actively participated in the meeting, and each contributed a lot of different ideas.

One person talked about a bake sale, and another suggested creating school items and selling them.

Some of the ideas involved holding special events on our school’s special days, such as Harmony Day; ICE (International Cultural Experience) Day; when people wear different traditional clothes and share each other’s culture; Sharks Week, when everyone at Australian International School comes together to foster school spirit as one community (the school’s mascot is a shark); and even mufti days, when people can wear their own clothes, but the school usually gives students specific colors to wear to show their support of the day.

However, considering the exam schedule and school events of the Year 10 class, the class participating in this CCA, we decided to do an event related to the upcoming Easter holiday. The name of the event was chosen to be “Easter Egg Hunt.” It was all about finding egg-shaped chocolates.

Although we had decided the main theme of the event, there were so many other factors to consider, such as the participants, type of chocolate (to avoid allergic reactions), date of the event, poster, promotion methods, and place and time, among others.

Over the next few weeks, we decided and made arrangements for all of these issues.

The week before the event, during the class morning assembly, we went to each of the Year 6 classrooms to promote the event and collect money from the students who wanted to participate in the Easter Egg Hunt.

We chose Year 6 students to be the event participants in consideration of the schedules of all the other Years.

The participation fee was $2, a hint was $1, a 10-second headstart was $2, and a 30-second headstart was $3.

Thankfully, the majority of the Year 6 students seemed to be interested in the East Egg Hunt. Many of them were quite excited to participate, and they asked us many questions too.

In the morning on the day of the event, we came to school a bit early to hide the chocolate in the playground. We then brought the Year 6 students down and arranged them based on their tickets.

The students who had paid for a 30-second headstart went first, followed by those with a 10-second headstart and then the remaining kids, who all ran to the playground to find the chocolates.

Even though it was sometimes quite difficult working on the event and arranging the students, I felt really happy as many kids seemed to enjoy it.

Before we finished the event, we once more told the students about our goal of raising awareness about people with no homes in Cambodia and thanked them for their participation.

Through this event, we were able to collect a huge amount of money to donate.

About 2% of the world population doesn't have a house to live and sleep in. Our event was a meaningful activity in that it allowed students to actually help, through small actions, such people who don’t have a home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yujin Son

Year 10

Australian International School

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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