MY Reading Program by HOPE Worldwide, Malaysia on 9 May 2015

Today, we departed from UM at 9.00am by LRT and had our first stop at NU Central to buy some small gifts for the children. We chose to buy stationery for the small kids as a motivation for them to pay more hard work in their studies. 30 sets of gifts were successfully prepared by us in a short while. Teamwork is indeed important in order to make job a success. 

Preparation of small gifts in process

Small gifts prepared – a file, a ruler, a sharpener and a pencil in a set

After the preparation of gifts and lunch session, we headed to Sentul Timur by taking LRT. We had to reach our destination by 1.30pm, as scheduled. In fact, we managed to arrive at HOPE worldwide centre around 1.00 pm with the help of a volunteer we met coincidentally at LRT Station. We appreciated and were blissful with the mercy she offered in leading us to the centre; otherwise, it would be a great challenge for us in search of it.

Agenda of the day was started with a short briefing by the supervisor, Caesar. From introduction of HOPE worldwide organization to briefing and preparation of activities, it had actually embarked our passion in serving or helping the community. The community there around Sentul Timur is mainly built up by the underprivileged group and majority of them are Indians.   In order to meet the basic needs, the basic 3 meals which most of us might take for granted, some of them are forced to commit crime just to fight for a living for their beloved family. They have no choice but to compromise to the reality. Engagement in this kind of program gave us an eye-opening experience in seeing the real situation of the poor, and of course, it made us to feel blessed for everything we have now.

As we can see from the picture, the living environment there isn’t well.

The reading program started at 2.30pm.

We started off with an ice-breaking session. We were one of the two volunteer teams of the reading program that day. Each of us introduced ourselves warmly to the little kids.  There were 30 kids in total whom aged from 5 to 9. For your information, these children are not orphans, but they are from the underprivileged families and are ready to improve themselves in term of speaking ability. We bonded and played games with the kids. The video below shows our interaction session and all of us did have fun throughout the session:

A closer bonding was created between us and the children. We continued with a story-telling session. The story we picked was titled ‘The Little Yellow Chicken’. Each of us had our role in this story-telling session to attract their attention and interest. We were figured out in the official Facebook page of HOPE Worldwide Malaysia:

Source : Official Facebook of HOPE Worldwide Malaysia

It was then followed by the main agenda of the day, which was the reading session. Each of us was assigned to accompany one or two students in reading. The major concern of this session was not to force them to read, but to instill their interest in learning English. One-to-one or small group learning was effective to stay focus on particular students. Each of them have different English level and what should we did was to teach and guide them accordingly. At the end of the reading session, we were asked to grade them from few aspects which were pronunciation, voice projection, confidence level, fluency and vocabulary. This was done to keep track of every kid about their improvement in English learning process. Throughout the reading session, we interacted with them as we are now friends with each other.

 

Before it came to an end, we distributed our gifts to every kid. Seeing the joy and happiness on their faces made us feel contented. At the same time, we felt even more grateful for what we had all this while. This moment of bliss was priceless; we enjoyed playing and learning with them. Not only for the kids. It was also a fruitful day for all of us as we learnt to be blessed and cherish every single thing in life. This was definitely a memorable experience for us and hopefully we will pay another visit to them again in future not because of the assignment need but our sincerity.

Seeing the smiles on their faces made us realized volunteers are not free. We are paid in five figures, S-M-I-L-E.