Daily Reflections by Jim & Wenjun

6th December 2010

Today was the start of week 2 of our ISLE trip. After a pretty successful R&R, everyone was back with more enthusiasm and energy, which was very good to see. ;)
The day started with the welfare team waking up early to prepare breakfast. The team made good use of the weekend supermarket visit to purchase many canned and more easily-prepared food. So eventually, it appeared that they did not require that much time. Breakfast was cereals and milk, lunch was sandwiches (which worked like a subway outlet) and dinner was spaghetti + mango pudding. Luckily, no one blamed them for the easy meals (partly because of the delicious food)! They used the extra time to do a little housework, stock-taking and napped just a bit. It was a great job done overall and definitely one of the best food days.
For building and construction team, they were introduced a new task, which was to start writing the essays about the families after the interviews. This made everything seem more like journalism instead of merely information gathering. There were several interesting stories heard today, including a woman with 9 children, and a visually-impaired man and his family. These stories gave us new insights on where the money our fundraising was going, and how this money was going to help them lead a more complete and fulfilling life. Stories have the power to move people, and the stories shared by them inspired us to put in extra effort in our lessons and building.
English, too went very well, with the students enjoying their lessons and also learning effectively. What’s more is that the ISLE members doing the teaching responded that they had fun going through the lessons too. Applying many of the lessons learnt in the past week could have also contributed to the success achieved today. One thing that could have been improved was the teaching style often employed during our lessons, a very detached lecture-style teaching that does not help engage the students. The group conducting English lessons suggested an effective way to engage the students through randomly quizzing them on their knowledge, and this success factor should be further emulated by future groups. Overall, the group doing English showed much initiative and enthusiasm in their lessons, and we hope that all groups can possess this positive attitude.
Hygiene was a recipe for disaster – the class being taught had only a fraction of the amount of time allocated to other classes. In essence, it was either the group compromised on content, or gave up on games entirely. Exceeding our expectations, the hygiene group managed to strike a compromise between the two evils, taking initiative to cut down on less important content, such as a lesson on changing clothes, to make way for the games that kept the class engaged and attentive.
In conclusion, we feel that the whole team has gotten more used to the conditions here and the culture shock we received when we first arrived has receded. We feel that this, and the experience from the first week probably led to the teams performing increasingly well in the various aspects. We hope this trend will continue and our remaining days will be just as smooth and fulfilling.
Written by Jim and Wen Jun