first class people.

♥Monday, 7 July 2008

Waha, this is gona be the first post abt SL. Woohoo! Oh, and this is an account from the morning shift.

on the thursday morning of the LAST WEEK of the holidays, we had to do SL. So everyone(in the morning shift) met up at Sembawang MRT station, along with their materials... which so many people brought........................ Then we waited and waited. Until the last person, taihuat i think, came. we finally departed towards the happy place know to us as Sembawang family service centre.

when we reached,ms delphine breifed us on what to do and what not to do and told us to expect for the better =).... Then a problem came up! oh no.... whatever shall we do? WE HAD A LIMITED SUPPLY OF MATERIAL!!!!! NOOOO!! this is all bcoz of the plentiful supply that everyone contributed. but nvm, its all ok. Despair and hopelessnes struck us.....until MINGHUI turned up with lots of egg crates. HE SAVED US!!! BUT THEN! the egg crates that he brought along contained an army of bugs.. seriously. girls went screaming and running about. haha. then bug extermination took place with lots of splattering and 'hiyah!' going on. After the army of bugs died ( hooray) we finally carried out what we came here for- SL !

So the morning shift people headed into the centre and greeted the kids. Our head (isabel and siying) then told the children what we will be doing with them today and laid down some ground rules along with it. After which, the morning shift ppl split into 3 groups; Group 1, 2 and 3 (obviously) , each gropu went off to their respectice venues to start work.

Group 1 then split the group of children into smaller groups where each group occupied one table. Each table had someone from 0108 to instruct the chilldren on how to do a paper marche. Group 2 and 3, on the other hand, each had one big table where we can monitor them as a whole.
While everyone had a role in monitoring children, some had special roles. Zhanglu was the photographer and went around taking photos of the fun moments. Isabel was the 'project manager' and basically went around the whole place making sure things were in place and tere was order.

Once divided into groups, the BEST part came. Teaching the children on how to make a paper marche! It was a tiresome process, but a rewarding one too at the same time. During the process of teaching the children on how to make the paper marche, MANY obstacles were faced. Children being children are overactive and full of energy. It was hard to find a moment where they could settle down peacefully to stick newspaper onto egg crates. Besides their overactive nature, there were specific individuals that were particularly hard to handle. But being the kind people we are ,we accepted them for their diferences and tolerated their behaviour. It wasnt easy though but i think we did it =) . Furthermore, some children upon seeing the hairdryer immediately played with it as if it was a toy. This was one major problem we face as the safety of the children are our main priority. their hands which are covered in starch due to the process of making the paper marche, could pose a threat when their hands come in contact with the wire. But isabel and siying foreseened this problem and warned everyone in 0108 to not let the children handle the dangerous hairdryer. Leave the dangerous things to us. And one major problem was that the products produced was not marketable despite the hard effort put in by the children. Some were presentable while others were....

But not all was bad. All in all, it was a valuable learning process for both 0108 and the children. Both sides gained from this extraordinary experience. At first we thought that it was troublesome to handle kids and had some negative impressions about them, but during the course of this session, we learned valuable virtues of tolerance and accpetance, patience and forgiveness. A fine example of such was Minghui when he was a victim. His white shirt was smeared with paint all ovee. Though he was angry at first, but he accpeted the fact that they are young and forgave them. wow, how kind. The children also benefitted as we imparted valuable skills such as independence. Through the course of making a paper marche we let the children have a personal hands-on experience where they did everything by themselves ( of course with some assistance from 0108 but it was the effort that counts ) .

After the process of making the paper marche, we left amidst the chorus of 'goodbyes' from the children . Following this was a short debrief by ms Delphine once again, where during the debrief she wanted us to reflect upon what was done today. And we must commend upon the children fine behaviour demonstrated during the clean up. In a nut shell, the children are good after all.

After the debrief, we left with smiles on our faces as newer and better people.

-ZhiHao

16:20;