Our first IMPACT project.

Last we wrote about our IMPACT club, we were just getting started with them, and felt like we bit off more than we could handle. A whole class of fifth graders had just been recruited to a club of high-schoolers, and Kelly and I had just taken over leading the club. Twenty fifth-graders in a classroom is crazy enough I'm sure, but when they're part of a club that's empowering them to be creative and leaders in their own right, they really take that seriously. The freedom to be heard and accepted for whatever you say invites a lot of weird things to be said and done. Especially when it's 12-year-old boys doing it. Oh well.

Despite their inability to have a civilized debrief discussion for more than 5 minutes and how much they like to hit each other and call each other peasants, we actually implemented a service-learning project last weekend! The great thing about being IMPACT leaders is that we're supposed to kind of step back when it comes to these projects and empower the club members to think through the project and do most of the work. We just try to ask the right questions and point out the things they might have missed and help them get materials. Our kids decided that they wanted to put on an afternoon of various competitions in the park, pretty much just to create an option for fun in a place where kids usually have to make their own fun. It's proper IMPACT project planning to identify a problem and then to creatively plan a project that addresses that problem. When we explained that this is the normal procedure, our kids told us that they knew a lot of kids who simply stay at home and play on the computer, so this "Active Day" in the park could draw them outside and away from the computer.

We had about a month and a half to teach these fifth graders what a service-learning project is and how to implement one, so I admit we had low expectations for this first project. Thanks, however, to three excellent junior leaders, some hard working fifth graders, and a ton of patience, we were on the way to having a killer day in the park planned sometime in July. Unfortunately, we wanted to do it on June 1st since school ends pretty soon after that. Fortunately, we had to push the date back to June 7, and that week before, we all managed to step up our level of focus and helpfulness. Kelly even went with Raluca, Maria and Bumb to gather a bunch of water so we wouldn't die of heatstroke.

When it came to Saturday the 7th, I was so thankful that we live in a small-ish town in Romania, because we were able to do so much that day. Andrada, Adelina, Raluca, Maria, and Bumb came early to hand out some awesome fliers that they had made to promote the benefits of a healthy lifestyle, and Kelly and I sat at a bench on the park trying to convince all the kids who flocked to us that the event wouldn't start until 1:30, and since it was still 11:45, they needed to go away for now so that we could set things up.

Eventually, we got the obstacle course and the start and finish line for the 150-ish meter dash set up. 70 kids signed up to participate, so we split them into two groups and ran them at the same time. Apart from a few inattentive timers and some argumentative competitors, everything went surprisingly well, mainly thanks to Eliza, one of the junior leaders, who led the competitors in fun large group games in between the events. Halfway through, we switched to the egg-in-a-spoon race (70 kids only broke 5 eggs! What?!?!?) and the race where you put a bottle full of river dirt between your legs and jump over small traffic cones as fast as you can.

In the end, we added up the fastest times and gave the top four kids in each age group (8-10 and 11-14) prizes--a soccer ball, badminton rackets, you know, sporty stuff. Once the competitors left, we rolled the tires from the obstacle course back across the street to the car shop, threw the remaining eggs either in the dumpster or as hard as we could on the ground (it's ok, the dogs ate them), and breathed a large sigh of relief. Our first IMPACT project. And it went well.