Wednesday, August 7, 2013

PASS update

With the last few days of Ramadan taking place this week, Abdi, the program director, decided it would be best to take the week off. This extra time has given me a chance to reflect on what I have been exposed to working with PASS over the last few weeks. It certainly has been a great learning experience and I am very glad to have been a part of it. First off, having attended catholic school all my life, I have never spent a large amount of time with people of the Muslim faith and I have to say it is a very respectable religion. Both the kids as well as some of the adults I am working with have been observing the holy month of Ramadan by fasting from sun up to sundown, a task which requires great devotion and mental and physical fortitude, especially for children as young as eleven. In addition to fasting, a handful of the children strictly observe their daily prayers, another form of religious devotion I have been very impressed by. A lot of the students seem to translate this devotion to their studies, and while many of them are very far behind their grade level in reading and writing, I have seen marked improvement in almost all of the students, which has been directly due to their hard work and dedication to coming every day. This program is completely voluntary, so a lot of the time we get a different crew of kids everyday, but the few who have managed to stick with us the whole time are really improving a lot. Just like any other group of kids, especially young boys, they do tend to get a little rowdy and act up on occasion, but I think, overal,l they have been very respectful and cooperative. This is even more impressive to me when I think about the fact that they haven't eaten all day, they are with a bunch of their buddies in a hot room and it is, after all, summer school, a place most kids would rather not be. My goal everyday is just to help them get excited to be there and to get excited about learning, a task that has been pretty easy with this happy, hard working group of kids. To be honest, I am pretty bummed that there are only a couple weeks left in the program. Unfortunately, because most of the kids live so far from the Somali youth center, it doesn't seem feasible to continue running the program as a sort of after school program during the year. However, if I do have an opportunity to keep working with these kids and their community, I would certainly jump at it.

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