:)

Yo! It looks I haven’t been writing a blogpost for very long since don’t know when…okok. Think is time for me to make some contributions to the blog. Don’t know what to write about so maybe I will just share some of my thoughts after volunteering in the SBH for about 2 years… Actually I am quite curious to find out the reasons why most of our youth volunteers want to join youth…for me why I came to join youth maybe is coincidence. Cos is being psychoed by boss Kelvin in Yr 1 to join WSC although in the end he only joined youth in yr 2. When I first started in Boys Home like after going for a session or twice…I was like quite quiet and shy at that time and never really interact much with the boys cos I don’t know what to talk to them about or more like I am scared I will say something that will offend them or what…it was the Annual camp that actually brought me more closer and taught me how to interact with them. The boys are like a bit more rebellious, uses a bit more vulgarities and they end up there because of mixing with the wrong groups of friends at the wrong time doing wrong things and get caught and punished by law. Sometimes I really feel quite sad for them cos they actually spend their most important part of their teenage years in the Home and worst they are being placed together with those similar to or even more worse than them.

I think that each of us has our own perception of volunteering like helping out the less fortunate, contributing to society, trying out something new or maybe trying to accumulate some good deedsJ Doing voluntary work… I believe most of us will not expect to get any form of rewards in return but …I think that most of us will have the mindset of wanting to do something that we ourselves will consider it as meaningful or useful to our beneficiaries…So what if one day you found out that they are not appreciative of what you are doing for them, they are not responding well to what you have done for them, or maybe you suddenly find that what you are doing does not seems to be meaningful to them…will you start to lose your passion for volunteering? I believe most of us will feel that… not trying to say is wrong cos even myself will feel that also. It’s perfectly fineJ and I think is normally to feel that way.

Cos every year, Youth is one of the portfolio in WSC that has one of the highest number of dropout rates and it looks like one of the problem is that a lot of our volunteers lost the passion for volunteering with the boys. Personally I feel that dealing with the boys is quite different from dealing with other beneficiaries. Compared to like elders, ids, HI, VH,… we are dealing with (I think)a more challenging group. Why challenging? Cos I think that they are too normal…some of them appear to be not appreciative of what we have done, some of them don’t really want to study even though we make an effort to go down to help them, some of them don’t really want us to pity them, some of them are just too noisy(KL)…so that’s y I find that this will make some of us feel that it isn’t that meaningful afterall compared to other portfolios.

In my perception Rsp Youth is more than just organising games for the boys, giving them tuitions or just befriending the boys…it is more of giving them a chance of spend their time with a different group of people and I believe that this is more important cos it is during this time they can get out of their cells, find out answers for their future, tell us certain problems that they are facing and probably get some advices from someone slightly a few years older than them(staffs are too old got generation gap)...this is why sometimes no matter how boring our sessions are(when we are playing some boring games), or when they are tired after one whole day of school(some of them are allow to go to sch), they will still take their time to come down for our NTU sessions. But of course for boys especially at their age most of them will not appreciate our efforts through words(maybe except a few) cos they will think saying things like thank you or showing that they are appreciative of what we are doing for them will appears to be weak?, gay?....so instead of saying thank you. They show their appreciation by their attendance, their active participation during our sessions, telling us their problems, treating u as a friend or even asking if you are coming next week…

So actually I think that whether the sessions in the boys home are meaningful or not does not really depends on factors like amount of boys that come up for session, how many volunteers that we have, the activities that we conduct during the sessions…but more on like your willingness to interact with them. So is actually up to us volunteers if we want to make our presence meaningful to themJ….okok think I have write too much already…PS is my England is a bit cui. GLHF!

Super busy during this quiz wk! finally had some time in the afternoon to write on previous 2 weeks of session!

Firstly was the maths IQ questions session! Every team is to solve some maths questions provided and the fastest team who answers and explains the question correctly wins. The classic question was " 5 monkeys took 5 mins to eat 5 bananas. How long did 8 monkeys took to eat 8 bananas?" Everyone was so sure its 8!! But the answer is still 5mins! Then the game progresses on to the more difficult problems which some of the boys lost interest in. Then comes the velocity distance questions which the boys are more confident in since they have learnt physics! In the end, i wanted a forfeit but apparently nobody was interested in it...so there's only food prizes but no forfeit. haha.

The session was considered a safe session to me. You can never go wrong with a series of puzzles as a game. It much more predictable than debates, telling ghost stories, where the boys might just ignore you. But anyway, its just a relaxing session not an exam so i still feel that we should try different activities in the future.

Then the following week was new volunteers bonding session 2! We played 7UP in malay and "ini ialah pensel" game. I admitted i was quite out of touch with the language and made numerous fundamental mistakes! Luckily, huixian was quite good at malay and corrected the mistakes. Most volunteers are not listening to the malay lesson but are in their own conversation instead! Oh well, looks like the intention of getting everybody tgt is reached. I already gotten used to being ignored after hosting so many boys home session. haha. Then we end off with "ipin dan upin!". I myself felt its super funny, dunno wad the new volunteers think. haha.

de-stress!

A new semester begins and it's time to hit the books... and let's also welcome the freshies! :)

But anyway, back to the session today. Since exams are nearing for the boys, we've been giving them tuition sessions but today it was time to de-stress and relax. The usual boys turned up and we played Pictionary. The boys and the volunteers were split into two groups and a volunteer from each group were given a sentence or phrase, which they had to convey to their group mates through drawing.

Initially the boys were hesitant to draw (shy alert) but they soon warmed up to the idea and joined in. It was so interesting see the various drawings and depictions (especially those of animals) of the answers, many of which included idioms. Try drawing "A wolf in sheep's clothing" or "Raining cats and dogs" and you'll get what I mean.

It's nice to have the opportunity to chill and have fun with the boys, for now let's continue to support them and help them in their studies. Can't wait for next week's session!

xinmu

P.S. after reading the previous entries, I realised this is my second time blogging about Pictionary...