JiaHe's Final Reflecition

Alright. This is 7.20pm on a Sunday evening and I realized barely 5 have blogged. So I shall now post what I have to say on this final reflection so mine won’t be the latest post which will be read by most people when they come to this blog =S

I must say that my opinion of outreach programmes have changed after joining this OCIP Yunnan team. In the past, when anyone mention about CIP, I would be thinking of things like what they need, what I’ve to do to improve their living condition, ways to help them etc. These thinking, although not intentionally, reflect our mentality towards the people that we are ‘helping’ – They are inferior to us and we people, as the superior ones, are going to help them. Indeed, this is what I felt when I first heard of OCIP as I believe that it is no different from CIP that we had in primary/secondary school. However I slowly got rid of these thinking when we started discussing what exactly is service learning.

Another aspect which had got me thinking quite a lot would be the magnitudes of service and learning and how it should be. Yes, the ideal would definitely be a big-S and a big-L whereby we maximize both service and learning. However, after the trip and doing some reflections, I realize there is a limit to everything, except learning. If we look at the amount of things we can do to help them, be it to improve their living conditions or help them financially, there’s always a limit to the level that we can help. But learning from this experience is different, definitely. We can’t deny the fact that we’ve learnt more than we’ve served and that’s the primary reason why I feel it’s small-S big-L. But we can always improve and someday I hope that we can achieve the ideal: Big-S Big-L.

Alright, enough for the ‘boring’ stuff and on to some experience that I had during the trip. What really scared me was how competitive the children there are. Seriously, if Singapore is already considered as very competitive, I’ve got no idea what is it over at China. Maybe it’s due to the fact that they are all very individualistic – no sharing, no giving in and no such thing as ‘teamwork’. Everything they do, everything they carry out is for no one but themselves. It is very obvious that they struggle from the games that we play with them, especially games that require teamwork. But yes, that’s how they’re brought up and there’s nothing we can do in that short 14 days – kind of helpless yea, aren’t we?

However, no matter how much their individualistic and competitiveness scare me, I must really say I’m respect their drive and determination. No matter how poor their studying conditions are, they strive to give their best in studies – studying in the morning before the teacher come, staying back straight after class to finish their homework and no late coming or any sort when they have to WALK an average time of 1.5 hours to reach their school. Don’t these things make us feel guilty? We have air-conditioned classrooms with brand new tables and chairs; we have qualified teachers and high tech equipments to facilitate our study; we have a good transport system that can take us around S’pore in an hour or so. But yet, we complain, we grumble that school sucks; we moan at the amount of homework that we have; we give excuses and whine at how early we have to get up for school when all it takes is barely 30 mins to reach school. I’m sure many feel the same as I do – that this trip certainly made us feel how lucky and fortunate we are to be here in S’pore. And hopefully, we can use this as a motivation to study harder and put in more effort by doing tutorials and listening in lectures =S

Now that the trip is over and we are all back in S’pore, I believe those 14 days will never be forgotten. I thought it was going to be a very very very long journey on the first day and was wondering how I’m going to survive. But time flies, like we always say, and for some funny reasons, I sort of wish to stay over there where there’s no stress, no worries and away from all realities. But that’s life and I’ve a friend who always says – Life, is a joke I didn’t get.

-Jia He