Final visit to the Alzheimer's center for this year.

Yesterday the Alzheimer's Group made a very special visit to the Alzheimer's center to round up the year of 2011.

This visit was different to others because of 2 main reasons:
- The purpose of the visit was to drop off the dry food items that our school community had donated during the past few weeks. This is the first fund raising activity that was planned, organized and initiated completely by ourselves, without any help from the foundation it self. By the end of it we managed to collect around 10kg of rice, 10kg of flour, 5kg of milk powder, 5kg of dhal and several jars of Sri Lankan style pickled chutney.

- In addition to this, we also got to actually meet and interact with the patients yesterday! This was a great experience, and our group members instantly engaged with them. We look forward to making more frequent visits to the center next year to ensure this happens more often.

Raising Donations for Alzheimer's

For the few weeks our group has been focusing on raising donations for the newly established Alzheimer's center. As they are still in the initial stages, the Foundation greatly appreciates any help given from volunteers.

On behalf of the Overseas School of Colombo, the Alzheimer's group decided to invite the school community to donate dry food items such as Rice, Flour, Dhal, etc, to be used for the purpose of the daily meal that is provided for the patients.

Heesoo and I have been very busy these days trying to get everything organized, and we have largely concentrated our meetings on spreading the word to the school community, as well as actually collecting the items.

Our strategy for raising awareness included sending an email to the school principle in order to gain permission, announcing the activity in assembly after this, emailing parents of the secondary school, and finally emailing the students to remind and reiterate the point.

This process has greatly improved our formal letter writing, and also our persuasive and informative skills.

In addition to the donation of food items, we have also been focusing on acquiring board games which can be used during the leisure/entertainment time by the patients. We appealed to the Primary School teachers about this, and got very good responses.

Heesoo and I are very proud of what we have been able to achieve through these meaningful activities, and have been getting a lot of positive comments from many teachers in our school about this year's Alzheimer's Service being a lot more active than previous years. That, more than anything, means a lot to us, and make us feel like we're actually doing a good job as leaders :)

Alzheimer's presentation during assembly

Yesterday during assembly Heesoo and I made a presentation about the Memory Box activity that we're planning.Additionally, we also appealed to the school community about donating dry food items to the centre, and the primary school about donating board games for the purpose of the entertainment of the patients.

The assembly announcement required quick adaptation, as the person who was supposed to give the presentation was not able to come to school, which required Heesoo and I to stand up to the challenge on such short notice. (hence I may have sounded like I wanted to run away while I was doing this unrehearsed and unexpected task :P)

The purpose of the Memory Box activity is to raise awareness about the importance of preserving memories.

All these activities are going to take a lot of planning on mine and Heesoo's part, but I feel that we're up to the challenge.