The Caritas Challenge Night Event took place on Friday, 3 June 2022 – a group of very eager Year 12 and 13’s willingly spent the evening in the school auditorium to take part in various activities to help them understand what it would be like to live in poverty or injustice.
The evening began with a small informational session sharing the main aspects the activities would be based on for the evening. The four main aspects were:
Move it – which meant to go the distance,
Sweat it – which meant to work under demanding conditions,
Live it – which meant to experience life in someone else’s shoes, and
Stop it – which meant to give up something.
To begin, each team had to participate in three different challenges where they would be going up against one another to get tokens that would give us more during dinner.
The first challenge was based on scripture – groups had to remember a story from one of the gospels and place cut outs in the correct order. Once successful, the group would receive a word jumbled up and they then had to cut out each letter and place it in the correct order. The second part to this challenge was ‘Chinese whispers’, where the group had to remember one section of the gospel and pass it throughout the group while also completing various physical tasks.
This activity was based on ‘live it’, so that we could understand about living out the gospel in our daily lives.
The second challenge was an activity which groups had to run a certain length to reach a water barrel, fill up a plastic bottle and empty it into a bucket. Once the bucket was full, a team member would then empty the bucket into the barrel and the process would restart. This activity was based on the ‘move it’ aspect so that we could understand how far people have to travel in order to get necessary essentials for themselves and families.
The third challenge was ‘a house building’ activity, where groups had to make a house out of cardboard and tape. This activity was based on the ‘stop it’ aspect so that we could understand how some people live and it made us realise how fortunate and comfortable we have got, and what we would have to give up.
After the challenges were completed, the groups then had to go through an obstacle course which was an activity that allowed us all to understand the ‘live it’ aspect and about how many people around the world seek refuge after leaving countries where their environments are not as stable as ours.
Once everyone had made it to the finish line, at the end of the obstacle course, they then had to fill up a bucket with water for each group, add a little bit of soap and a certain item of our clothing. This was in order to understand the ‘sweat it’ aspect, where we need to appreciate the modern appliances we have in our lives that make life easy, like washing machines and dish washers.
For Dinner, there was a sausage sizzle. The tokens which groups had won (throughout the challenges) were able to be exchanged for sauces, a hot chocolate with marshmallow and for a couple of small chocolates. To finish off the evening, we did handprints, where we wrote what we could cut down to help make a difference and a small prizegiving where the leaders and participants were handed a certificate.
Thank you so much to Dr. Laux, Sean Carlos, Adrian Vargas, Samara Anubhav, and Thomas George for all the hard work you put into organising the Caritas Challenge for this year. Also, a shoutout to all the other Prefects that helped with running the different activities and staff that helped as facilitators. It was a special night.
