1st March 2008 - Visit to West End Project at Jurong Garden School

Due to some of the residents have experienced food poisoning recently, thus MINDSville advised us not to go down to visit them to prevent further complications just in case. As a result, the residents are under quarantined now. Therefore the usual TH project got to be closed till the MINDSville had given us a green light to resume the project once the residents are well again. :)

So two of our volunteers, Jie Hua and Pauline arranged for some of us to pay a visit to West End project, which is also one of the six MYG project. The main objective of this visit was to allow us to observe the other project's modus operandi. (See how they run their projects) This was also be an opportunity for us to interact as well as share our experiences and good practices with the WE volunteers. In fact the WE project does parallel TH's in certain aspects; one of them is that both of us have a high university volunteers and school students presence in our projects. Secondly is that we both have many dedicated and fun-loving volunteers... that's you and me...If you didn't know, TH has its roots in WE; as it was previous WE volunteers like Marnchee and Zhihua who grew Terra Hope project out of WE. So this will be like going back to our roots! (extracted from Chew Ling's email... haha~)

We were kinda of late for the visit, so we missed the 1st part of the programme which was supposed to be sing-along session... :( But I was amazed by the mass self-introductions of the trainees to the volunteers. The trainees would grab the microphone from the volunteer and introduced themselves to us. In addition, they would mention the things they like to do and their various hobbies and interests.

After that, the trainees and the volunteers were splited into two groups, one group would have a road safety lesson by the West End volunteers and the other group would be with the NTU volunteers (RSPID) for the life skills lessons. For the Road Safety Lesson, it's pretty interesting cause the powerpoint slide actually show a nice little cartoon character (I forgot the name of the cartoon charactor liao) teaching on the right way of crossing road and other road safety deviceike traffic lights, zebra crossing etc. So creative :)

We didn't stayed throughout the Road Safety lesson, we moved on to the next classroom which the RSPID volunteers were conducting life skills session with their attached trainees. The whole project was ended with a mass Linbo rock dance consisting of the trainees and the volunteers... :)

Conclusion:

- West End is in the way similar to Terra Hope as they also worked with school and university students (in this case is RSPID for West End and NUS CSC for Terra Hope).
- I like the way on how their mass self introduction of the trainees were carried out. It's really a good method to allow the trainees to open out to the volunteers :)
- The methods of handling the West End's trainees were different from how we handled our residents in MINDSVILLE. Their trainees were in the way more independent compared to ours in MINDSVILLE.
- The trainees addressed their volunteers as "teacher" whereas our MINDSVILLE residents addressed us as "Kor Kor"/"Jie Jie".
- The life skills taught by the West End volunteers and RSPID volunteers were in a way part of our daily life. For example, for the Road Safety Lesson by the WE. I understand from the WE side that besides the powerpoint slides on road safety, they will have a "practical" session on the next project session... so the trainees can "practise" and at the same time learn from their mistakes from their videos taken from the "spying" WE volunteers behind them. :) As for the RSPID volunteers, some of the life skills taught to the trainees including how to read the time using analog clocks. The volunteer used a "clock face" made of paper plates without the numbers. Then their respective trainees had to rearrange the clock face numbers accordingly. After that, then their volunteers would teach them how to read the time using the hour hand and the minute hand. And of course, there were other life skills taught to other trainees such as How to do simple Maths, How to save money and many more... (I forgotten some of it... so sorry *sob*)
- Their sound system is very very SOLID!!! Comes with USB and can play MP3 somemore... *grinz* Ours is only a small little Enzer radio cum CD player (CD player spolited liao) and our main sound system are from the recreatation room and the MPH PA system. *sad*

In a nutshell, it's an eye-opener for us who had went last saturday. We had learnt alot from the West End/RSPID volunteers. It's indeed an enriching experience. :)

~shawn