Community Service was not a painful experience

WRITER : AMIRAH QURRATUAIN BINTI HAIRUL AMRI (KIL170007)

Community service is an important activity where every person should embrace as they growing up. Today, I would like to share the story of my community service with my beloved friends 😍.

Preparation phase 

After receiving the community service task from the CITRA, me and my group mates starting to make some research on few organizations. Then, we found Rumah Hope as it is nearby University of Malaya. Rumah Hope is a sanctuary placed for abused, neglected and underprivileged children. It is located at Petaling Jaya and it took only 10-15 minutes by driving 🚗. On 25/03/2019, we had a casual visit to Rumah Hope to estimate the number of children and to decide what activity can be carry out there. After some discussion among us, we decided to visit the place for four times as for each single slot we will spend around eight hours there (11am-7pm). In addition, we came out with the activities that we will be doing with the children. After that, one week before we started our program there, me, Syafiza and Amina went to shops some stuffs such as snacks, stationary and some mini games (snakes and ladder, checkers, etc) for the children. It was a very enjoyable experience.

Ongoing phase

On the first day, my first impression was not too exciting as the children are very active and it's hard to control them at the first place. But after few hours mingling, the children got comfortable with us and they started to hear us out. In the afternoon, we helped the children with their homework and we taught them some basic spelling, math and science. In the evening we had some interesting activities with the children. We had an ice breaking game with the children where we sat with the children in a circle and played some music while passing around a snack. When the music stop at the person who's holding the snack, that person has to introduce themselves. It's very fun to watch that the children enjoyed our session with them. For our second visit, we taught the children how to write the alphabets and reading books with them. Most of the children are age between 7 to 12 years old. We also had sport session with the children where we played badminton with the boys and for the girls we had a coloring session with them. On the third visit, we helped the care keeper to clean the store room at Rumah Hope. Even on that time our men power is not enough but we managed to clean and organized the stuffs in the store.  On our last visit, we did some games such as crossword puzzle, drawing, coloring and we had some quizzes with the children. We also taught them on how to do origami. Before we end our session there, we took pictures with the children as a sign of commemoration. We also gave the children goodies bag as gifts. 

Post program phase

We shared many laughs and stories while doing our community service. It was satisfying to help improve these people's lives. I took pleasure in how much I learned at Rumah Hope. All of us are living on the Earth in a habitat for humanity. We have responsibility for each other. We should help anyone who is on need and be sympathy to others. That is what the community service teaches me. Besides that, I also found out that this community service helps us to understand lots of things that we have never thought about before. It taught us to notice others people around us and become the real part of the society, not only a factual part of it. I realized that it is not painful to work for community service and all the lesson I have learned will have a significant influence for my future life.