Pema Wangzome

After hearing about Summit Leadership Park, I knew that it was where I wanted to live my sophomore year. After getting a group of friends together and deciding what our service project would be, I was very excited. Summit seemed and seems like an experience that will do both me and the community some good. It is something that I am happy to be a part of.

Hopefully, I will gain a lot from the Young Athletes Program with the Special Olympics. I have never done anything with the Special Olympics before, so I hope to just gain experience with working with special needs children. I also hope to gain friendships with the children. I love working with children, so this will be a great experience for me. Overall, I just hope to gain a great and fun experience.

The Young Athletes Program will definitely impact my life in a good way. It will give me perspective on my own life and what special needs children lives are like. It will also impact my involvement with the Springfield community. This is only my second year in Springfield and I would like to get to know the community more. It is quite different from my home, and I enjoy getting to know new people.

Our project is with the Special Olympics. It is a program called the Young Athletes Program. So far, we’ve accomplished a lot of work. The Joplin tornado went through the Special Olympics offices in Joplin. Because of this, we’ve had a little delay in paperwork and getting in contact with our Special Olympics contact. We have finally met with her though. She gave us the paperwork that we needed and a tutorial in working with the kids. We’ve also booked the Weiser Gym for the times that we will need it. Now, all we need to work on is getting our volunteers and kids to participate. Luckily, our contact gave us the phone number of a woman we can talk to who has done this program before. As for struggles and frustrations, the Joplin tornado is about it. Because of that, we have decided to switch our program from an eight week program to a four week program this semester. 

This semester we will figure out what we are doing. Next semester we will know what we are doing and be able to have an awesome eight week program.