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On wedsnesday I started my voluntary work at Peace Village day care centre. It was a bit difficult at first as the language barrier made communication so difficult; I stumbled awkwardly through some Vietnamese introductions. However, once I started playing with the children, it somehow didn't really seem to matter that we didn't understand each other! I spent the morning working with a small group of teenagers with mental disabilities, and most of them had Down's Syndrome. These children were quite independent in entertaining themselves, they were happy sitting reading a book or playing board games. I played lotto with a couple of the boys, and then the teacher challenged me to a game. He kept cheating! I mostly let it pass though as it was really nice to see the teacher for once engaging with the children, in trying to beat me! The behaviour of teachers has been suprising. Most of them just sit in the classroom and 'supervise' the kids, but do not talk to them or do any activities, the teacher just sits at their desk or chats on their mobile. Therefore it's up to the volunteers to entertain the children. However, I have not witnessed any rough treatment or disciplining of the children, unlike volunteers at other projects, so that's positive.
I met a boy called Minh, who I think has some form of autism. As soon as I arrived, he got me to write down my name, dob, weight, and height in his notebook, to add to the list of information about all the other volunteers! He also has a list of about 50 action films, each detailing the name of the main character, and the actor's initials and full name- incredibly methodical, and all in English! He had everything from spiderman to the matrix, and I was very happy to see that Johnny English had made 'the list'!
In the afternoon, I was put in front of a bigger class of children and told to talk about myself (in Vietnamese!), it was ok, I stumbled through. The teacher I was with was actually really nice and spoke some english, she asked me to teach the children some english songs; I did baba black sheep and humpty dumpty. I had to sing them by myself at least 40 times until they picked up the right pronunciation- me singing!!!! Oh dear, I hope the language difference masked to out of tune-ness!
Thursday and Friday were similar- lots of playing! I taught the children the 'hokey cokey' song, which they LOVED, particularly with all the actions! Muscial chairs has also been a hit.
One of the classrooms has a piano, which I was messing around on with some if the kids when one of the teachers placed a song book in front of me, open on 'Fur Elise'- the original! No pressure! Thankfully I had played it before so it wasn't a complete sight read, and I managed to get through it (Mrs. Robinson would not have been impressed!!). There were also some Vietnamese songs in the book, which the children enjoy singing along to.
We also played some games which was fun.
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