Realize

Just realize the joy of lending my time to community work:) Recently, an organisation contacted our School on the possibility of engaging our students and facility for a IT workshop for our senior citizens for free. The instructor and training notes would be provided by the company. It also aims to foster inter-generation bond. I said, why not? It sounded meaningful and beneficial for the students.

So I proceeded to touch base with the Profs and students respectively, if they would be willing to go for a pilot test early September before committing it on a long term basis. All was agreeable as long as it did not take a toil on the students. A quick briefing was also provided to the student volunteers to aid them in the community work.

On Friday, we met up with the group of seniors, the trainer and the organisation staff to kick start the Thematic workshop for the elderly. As the target audience was a group of seniors, he was very patient and guided them step-by-step. Basically, the workshop aims to teach the matured folks how to write Chinese characters using the USB input pen.

As I have volunteered to write an article on this samaritan act, I also joined in happily. And even pulled along a colleague of mine to make up for the shortfall in the student volunteers. All went well as we tried our best to engage in the right language (be it English or Mandarin) to assist to their queries better.

Overall, it was an enriching experience for both the seniors and the students. For the former, one lady from Hong Kong told me that she could now use the technology to write Chinese email to her friends in her home country. For one student volunteer, he confessed that it had helped him to be more patient when communicating with the seniors. And it felt so good, I want to do it again!