CAPT Kamal 2020/2021

Article written by Gillian Yeong

Despite the pandemic stacking all odds against Overseas Service Learning (OSL) projects, this is CAPT Kamal’s 6^th iteration. Besides having adapted to various COVID-19 restrictions, the team of 16 students took on a dual-pronged approach to inspire students in their pursuit of education. This entailed a remote engagement with our long-time NGO partner based in Bangalore, and a new local engagement with students from Queensway Secondary School (QSS) in a weekly mentorship program.

Local Mentorship with Queensway Secondary School

This year, CAPT Kamal has newly taken on a partnership with SHINE Children and Youth Services to contribute to an ongoing mentorship program with the Secondary 3 QSS students from the Normal Technical (NT) stream. The mentorship journey endured through seven months from February to August 2021, seeking to impart socio-emotional coping skills and communicative development skills to students through hands-on team activities with training and continual support from SHINE. Through weekly mentorship sessions, the team bonded with the students as mentors alongside adult volunteers from Queensway Baptist Church (QBC) to be a positive adult role-model to the students and promote positive schooling outcomes such as reduced truancy rates. In conjunction with SHINE’s scaffolding program, the team also strove to empower the mentees to craft meaningful educational programmes for the students in Bangalore, India. The QSS students had a chance to meet the students and teachers in India virtually and had a short cultural sharing of the Singlish language. The mentorship programme eventually concluded with mentees presenting their teachers a meaningful teachers’ day presents of crafts and a display of their various talents in a video.

Collaborative Day-Camp with CAPTSLAM (Queensway)

As it is the first year these two projects in CAPT are engaging with a common partner (albeit different groups), the team collaboratively rolled out a day-camp to promote interaction and understanding across the NT class and the dominantly Express stream CCA leaders of the school. The students and their respective mentors bonded in the camp through interactive games and sports.

Online Summer Camp

In the last two weeks of May 2021, CAPT Kamal once again partnered with Dream School Foundation (DSF) to conduct a fortnight-long educational camp for students from vulnerable socioeconomic backgrounds on platforms such as Google Meets, Docs and Forms. DSF is an NGO that strives to make equity and equality in education, overall development and a happy childhood a reality for children through extra-curricular classes and various alternative sources of support. While the previous iterations of the project met the students in India, the team this year made the online summer camp a reality with the industrious support of DSF’s dedicated teachers. While the students from India face multiple obstacles in their pursuit of education to begin with, the lockdown resultant of the pandemic virtually closed all their doors to education for months on end. Many of these students already possess a high risk of dropping out of school in order to financially support their families from low-income backgrounds, which entraps them in a vicious poverty cycle. Building upon past iterations’ efforts to plan innovative ways of learning traditional subjects, the team also shared essential soft skills such as financial planning and SMART goals that were collaboratively curated with the QSS mentees. WhatsApp groups were formed and that allowed members to see the efforts of the DSF students as they sent photos of their completed hands-on activities. Through this initiative, CAPT Kamal aspired to motivate the pursuit of knowledge and holistic development in academic and non-academic settings.