Volunteer experience!! (Zoo Negara + Tadikum ) - Zhi Lun

Volunteer experience!! (Zoo Negara + Tadikum )

On the day that announcing all the first year students should complete a course called “Social Engagement”, most of us will think that “Oh My God!! It is going to sacrifice my time and my holiday to do volunteer jobs! Oh no!!” or “Aiya, cincailah, just simply do to fulfill the credit hour enough la.” At the beginning, I am belong to these group of people too! But, after all the activities that we have done, some sweet and interesting memory had been planted in my brain. Actually, being a volunteer is not that difficult and time consuming as most people would think. This course, Social Engagement is actually a good programme that can help undergraduates to engage with the community and build their characters within themselves and let them know the current environment wants those who are not only know how to follow, but to lead the society next time.

             To be engaged with the social, we decided to plan some activities with it, which is also part of our social – animals. We often forget animals are our parts of social too. Hence, we wish to take this opportunity to take care of those animals and we decided to participate in a volunteer program at Zoo Negara Malaysia in Ampang. We managed to take care deer, porcupine and goats on the first week on at Zoo Negara while reptiles like tortoise on the following Friday in Zoo Negara.

We did the activities that we never do before like cleaning the feces of the animals, feeding them and also help to scrub the tortoise’s shell too! For the early morning of first day in cleaning the feces, actually I was really not able to withstand the smell. And this make me realize that what the zookeepers does is not only jobs like playing with the animal and feeding them only, instead its beyond that. From here, I was able to understand that each jobs have their difficulty. As I put myself in their position I realize that I should respect all the jobs in this world.

            Actually there are lots of fun and interesting activities for us to do as volunteer in Zoo Negara. But, do you actually know what is the value behind when we do these activities? Probably, you would say that we only enage with the animals instead of the community. Actually, from Zoo Negara, it helps to instil our love toward the animals, make us appreciate what the Mother Earth had gave us and caring the environments which belongs to our social too. For your information, social is not only refers to the humans, but also refers to all living organisms as applied to populations of the animals too! Hence, we learnt to remember and take care of animals which are parts of our social.

For the next activities after the Zoo Negara is going to be the kindergarten in Universiti Malaya, which named Tadikum. We decided to go to kindergarten because all of us love children! Haha! Perhaps all of us can be good father and mother ya! LOL! So, I was given the task on handling 6-years-old children. 6 years old, let me count, 21-6 is 15. Woah... throw back to 15 years ago, what have I done? Okay, seem like I am out of the topic already. So, for these 6-years-old kids, I work together with Aishah and Sivanes to plan the activities with them. We did story telling session, colouring contest and also word search. 

          This is the first time handling so many kids, it is very exciting! As I was the storyteller for these children with the topic of “Dinosaur and Big Fish”, it make me realized that the tones and expression are important to capture the children’s attention. Otherwise they will just ignore you. All of us manage to solve the problems that we encountered, such as when a kids sulks ( merajuk ), when they are not feeling well and etc. All these problems actually train our patience and at the same time allow us to find an equilibrium point between taking care of them instead of following their “instruction”. Hence, the one day activity we spent in Tadikum managed to train us on how to communicate with children and think of how to make the lessons and activities become more interesting.

So, everyone out there, volunteer works is not that difficult and time consuming like you think. It can actually benefits us and help us to become a well-rounded person. Before I end this, I would like to say : Everything that you do depends on your heart and how you want to make it to be, the more you give, the more you gain!

Best regards,

Zhi Lun’15