One Day with SAFEL, better known as ODWS, is an annual program of SAFEL by the Department of Foreign Language Training that gives SAFEL crews the opportunity to volunteer and collaborate with the social community. This year, ODWS collaborated with the Sekolah Gajahwong Community located in Ledok Timoho. This year’s ODWS was held on September 9, 2023, with the theme “Discover, Play, and Learn: A Step to Unleash Younger Potential”.
One Day With SAFEL started with open recruitment for volunteers. This year, there are 62 volunteers, which consist of 46 online volunteers and 16 offline volunteers. Then all volunteers participated in an online campaign to upload twibbon, infographics, and pamphlet donations for the community. After that, we do the offline volunteering as the D-Day ODWS; only the offline volunteers and committee can join the offline volunteering that was held on September 9, 2023, in Sekolah Gajahwong.
On the day, the kids are so excited to play together with the volunteers that they keep demanding to start the event earlier. Then the event started with an opening by the MC, followed by remarks from the SAFEL President and the volunteer coordinator from Sekolah Gajahwong. After that, all the volunteers introduced themselves to the participants. We moved to the costume display session; at this moment, all the costume models would do the catwalk and explain about the costumes they wear. After the costume display is the main event, which is playing games.
At this event, the committee prepared three games. First, we played guess the word in silence. We divided all the participants into three teams and gave the last member of the team a word to describe the word silently to their member. In the first round, the team was so competitive and became chaotic for a moment, but the second round went smoothly. In the second game, we played “folded paper”, In this game, one of the kids chose one of the folded papers that contained some topic, and the other participants guessed the meaning in Bahasa Indonesia. After that, the kid would describe the topic from their perspective. All the kids describe the topic in various ways, and they’re so cute when delivering the story.
In the last game, we play guess the greetings, where the volunteer gives greetings, and then the participants guess the right time to use the greetings. After that, we ate together a small dish from Scotland named banana piskote. And the event continued with the handing of the donations from SAFEL to Sekolah Gajahwong. The event ended with photo sessions, and all of us made good memories of that day. I sincerely want to thank Sekolah Gajahwong, who will be our partner this year, and give huge appreciation to the committee and volunteers who work hard to make this event success.
-Pauline Mariaela
