Volunteering

While I was in Florida I spent a lot of time volunteering at the girl’s school. I was on the PTO board for 4 years as VP & Treasurer, was class Mom for 3 years, on the School Advisory Council for 4 years and actually received a school “Volunteer of the Year” award as well as a District “Volunteer of the Year” award. I enjoyed every minute of it but I definitely was burnt out by the time Sara graduated from Elementary School in May 2010! I have to admit that I was looking forward to some down time when we moved here to Abu Dhabi. I used the excuse that we were new when the requests would come out for volunteers!

But old habits die hard I guess! After the New Year I was beginning to feel guilty! And realized that it was through volunteering that I had met some of my best friends. Here in Abu Dhabi, Leon takes the girls to school in the morning and they walk home afterwards so I am hardly ever at school accept for the monthly Parent Coffees. I knew that I had to do something. So I volunteered to be on the first annual Career Day committee. This was actually a challenge at first because they wanted us to approach the parents of students to be the speakers. I didn’t know very many families so I didn’t have anything to offer! But luckily they were happy to have volunteers who could follow up with phone calls & emails! I can do that I said!

So at our committee meeting last week it came out that no one had stepped up to chair the coordination of the American Table for the school’s International Day!! “What?” I said. That would be an enormous embarrassment at an American School!!! The other 2 ladies in the room agreed, and we were all interested in helping but one of them works and the other is chairing the Career Day. My excuse?….Ah, well, “I’m new. I don’t know anything about the International Day.” But we have to be represented at this event I thought. So OK, I’ll get my friend Kay to help me and I can do this! So I got Kay to help me create a theme & menu and we sent out emails to the few people we knew hoping for more help! The big challenge was that we had a week to pull this together! Well I work best under pressure anyway!

Well we found, that as is typical, many Moms wanted to help out but no one really wanted to be in charge! So as soon as I took on that role, the rest just fell into place! The responses came pouring in! Within 48 hours we had everything taken care of! Even the American Embassy donated decorations! We had Pigs in a Blanket, chicken wings, brownies, chocolate chip cookies, potato chips and coke & lemonade! And I had 8 volunteers to help the day of the event!

There were over 20 different countries represented on the field! We each had a booth and offered food & drinks that were traditional to our country. Booths were also decorated with flags, maps, traditional items and such. We of course were surrounded in red, white & blue! Around our map we had a cowboy hat, surfboard, and baseball & football gear! We also had out a Scrabble game for the kids to play because we found out it was created by a New Yorker in the 1930s!!

The kids were released from class at 12:40 and by 12:45 the craziness began! We had been under the impression that they would be fed first, but I think they ran right to the field as we had crowds right away! This event was for Middle & High schoolers only which was about 600 kids!! Yikes – that’s a lot of hungry mouths to feed! It was so cute to see the kids get excited about the chicken wings & pigs in a blanket! And when they heard the pigs in a blanket had real pork mini hotdogs in them they went wild!!! It was quite warm out so the cokes went quickly and we could barely keep up with the making of the lemonade! We were out of the main food in less than 40 minutes! Luckily I had hundreds of baked goods!

The kids had been given passport books which included 3 questions about every country on display. They were to answer the questions and turn in their passport for prizes. I think the MS kids were the only ones that really participated in this part of the event! It was fun to have kids from other countries coming to ask who the first US president was! I really enjoyed seeing many of the kids wearing their own country’s traditional dress! I don’t think kids in the US would walk around in outfits like that! These kids are very proud of their heritage – it’s really neat!

After the food was pretty much gone, the principal called all the kids over to the stage and the parade of nations began! She called each country and the kids from that country would run up onstage, grab their flag and then parade around past the tables and line up in the middle of the field! It was just like the Olympics! It was great! So many countries! The biggest contingency was from the USA of course, then Canada, Lebanon & Palestine actually! I was surprised at the number of kids from countries in South America too!

I had been very nervous about volunteering here, but this was a great event and I met some very nice Moms. I guess I’m not new anymore!