Community Service

Part of the program that our students are participating in is a requirement to perform service in the community while studying abroad. This service helps them to rub elbows with people from Malta or other cultures, and gives them some first-hand familiarity with some of the issues facing Maltese society that they are studying about in their classes.

Face painting was a new thing, so the college kids had to show it was "cool."

More than half of the students in our group are volunteering with an agency called Organization for Friendship in Diversity (OFD) that works primarily with refugee children. They go once or twice a week to a convent that houses several refugee families, mostly from Sudan and Syria, to help kids with homework, get them speaking English, and just providing friendship to some kids who have been through an awful lot of trauma in their young lives.

Then some of the refugee girls got into it.

Today OFD held an Easter party for refugee kids from the site where our students volunteer, plus kids from another site. It was held at a sort of retreat center or environmental education center “out in the country” (meaning it was midway between two towns that may have been two miles apart) on the northwest side of the island.

Finally, when they saw that a Spider Man face was possible, the boys wanted in, too.

There were games, an Easter egg hunt, archery, soccer, a tree house with a swing, treats and other activities. Since Malta is so densely populated, kids rarely get an opportunity just to run outdoors on a surface that isn’t concrete or stone. Some seemed never to have been on a swing before. It was good for the kids, and a good experience for our students.