Hello everyone! I am Lisa Gushiken and I am a part of the Global Citizen in CAP steam. Soci 100, which is a part of the standard timetable if you’re part of this program. It provides a great opportunity, the TREK program, to get out of the campus for a good reason and to get into the community that we are a part of. As a 1st year, presuming from reading this, it is difficult to be a part of the community we are in. (Plus, we don’t have to write a 16 page essay at the end of the year.)
I was placed in the Discovery Club at Morley Elementary School which is a program offered by Frontier College. It is an after-school program for elementary school children and we provide them with snacks and a small activity they do. The program run on every Thursday from 2:45 to 4:30. The majority of the children were from Syria and many couldn’t speak that much English. My role as a volunteer was to help the coordinator with taking care of the children and to help the children with the activities.
My volunteer experience had two major points for me. The first one is that I got to get a first hand experience with children learning English. As an international student myself, I know how hard it is to learn a new language at such a young age. As I have grown, I have realized it that it is actually the easiest way to learn a language but when you are young it is a big hardship you need to overcome to have friends and communicate with your teachers. In our program we had a 7-year-old child and she just moved from Syria with her siblings. Her siblings caught up on English quite quickly but she couldn’t probably because she was so shy. She got a lot of help from her siblings and the other children who spoke the same language in the program. However, over the year she become able to speak for herself and she became active and cheerful than before. The transformation was one of the things we wanted to achieve during the program but felt like we couldn’t do it in this short period. 
The second one is that I realized that I do really good with children at that age. I have loved children and taking care of them too from when I was little. I didn’t think that I could handle multiple children because I have never worked like this until this program. However, after winter break, the children felt so comfortable with me being at the program and was happy to share their happy and sad moments with me. They would run to me when they had anything that they wanted to tell me and we would have a short catch-up moment at the start sometimes. Also, when a problem happened in the program, I was always the one calming and taking care of the sad or angry children. My coordinator trusted me that I would do everything well and resume what I need to do with that child when everything is OK, so he let me do anything that I felt necessary.
Looking back at the whole year of volunteering in Vancouver as a first year was actually really fun and interesting. There are so many good things that I didn’t mention in this post. However, all of the programs are quite far and require some time for transit. For me it took me about 1.75 hours to get there, but I was happy that I got to get out of campus every week. I used the transit time reading my notes or anything that needed to be done. I recommend that you take in that consideration because I know for some people it might be a hardship for some people. I got to see a side of Vancouver that other people don’t really get to see and had an experience their community. It is a really good way to realize that the UBC community and the communities surrounding UBC are just a side of Vancouver and it is quite distinctive from the others. If you are still deciding between the TREK program and discussion section, I will recommend the TREK program if you like interacting with people and don’t like to be in your dorm all the time. I hope you have a really good time in the Trek program.
Good luck with every subject in Global Citizens. (From someone that ended the whole steam and is in final season studying so much.) It might seem hard but everyone will be OK in the end!!