“Everyone can be great, because everyone can serve.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Painting Smiles: My Experience at Bal Mela

As kids, we experienced boredom from our regular arts and crafts tasks, forced upon us by our artsy teachers. Cutting those little strips of paper and colouring a small area with different shades of colour. Now as high school students, we are invested in studies, extracurriculars, and the little spontaneous chilling out trips, but the dried out paint and brush in the corner of my drawer recites a story not so old of a little girl who painted the same sceneries over and over with the typical mountains and river. They still call out to me to make a beautiful piece of something colourful, vibrant to express my inner turmoils on the canvas. I didn’t. But, when I came back from school after the Bal Mela, the first thing I did was I picked up my dried paint, added water to it and washed out the dried paint from my brush tip. I sat on my chair, pulled out a blank A4 white paper and splashed and dabbed paint in different shades. By the end of it, I felt relieved and content. I thought deeply about the children at the Bal Mela who get only a few opportunities to do craftworks only a few times a year due to the lack of resources. Reflecting on my experience, the learning outcomes from the Bal Mela are LO4 AND LO5.

LO4 – Show perseverance and commitment in CAS experience

Bal Mela was organised to allow the underprivileged students of the government schools to participate in various activities such as face painting, sports, tattoos, etc, but I was part of the activity of MAKING MONSTER MASKS FROM PAPER PLATES. There were students of more than 6+ schools, which is a lot! There were a lot of students who kept pouring, it seemed the endless line of curious and excited children would never end. There were a lot of tasks, such as cutting paper plates in half, cutting paper shapes from colorful papers, gluing, mixing paints for the kids and other miscellaneous tasks. There were more than 300-400 students and let me tell you, it was NOT easy to keep up. I was the messenger from the worktable from where materials were kept to the several tables where the children were seated and painting. “Didi! Didi! Didi ye red wala colour de do! Didi ye chipka ke do”, were the only requests I could hear from all four directions. It was hectic and even stressful but I didn’t let it falter with my perseverance and commitment to the CAS activity. I put on a charming smile as I attended the tasks at hand.

Eventually, I enjoyed getting my hands dirty with paint. By the end of the Bal Mela, my hands had streaks of orange, yellow, green and a lot of red. I felt happy and content that I could be a part of the reason for the bright, charming smiles of the children sitting across from me. Definitely was a lot of work but it was worth it.

LO5 – Demonstrate skills and benefits of working collaboratively

My fellow peers contributed to the mask making too. We worked collaboratively to make sure that we can give equal attention to all the students, if anyone needed any assistance. I would cut the plates and distribute them to the little Picassos waiting in the line, the other teammate would demonstrate how to make the masks to the students, and Hirva would stick glue to the plates for the red monster horns. It was a fast and a steady rhythm of distributing work equally and signalling each other just by looking at each other or nodding our heads. Skills such as communication, management, observation, planning, perseverance and commitment have been demonstrated. Working collaboratively is the only reason why the bal mela went smoothly for me.

Conclusion:

Chapter 3 comes to an end in my journey in the life of an IB DP student life. Stay updated for Ch4!

The End