Volunteer Work

Last Sunday, my gf and me went for a voluntary work organized by Tzu Chi joint together with UNHCR - United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees.

This is the first time I had been a volunteer. The work that Tzu Chi is providing here is of basic health care and dental care. There were approx. 50 volunteer who was working together in groups.

The process starts with a group of volunteer maintaining order and line up and giving queue number for the patients, then they will proceed to the next process of registering them where their name, ID number, where they stay, their martial status, their country of origin etc is recorded in a form and keyed into a database. For those who had came before, they would already have a database, then their record will be taken out from the file. For those first time visit, new registration will be given. Of course these patient do not speak much of English, so among the volunteers, there were translators helping out to translate. Most of them are from Myanmar aka Burma.

Then, they proceeded to the pre-check stations, where their blood pressure, weight and height is recorded before proceeding to see the General Practitioner. As for those who were there to seek dental treatment, they will proceed straight to see the dentist. After their consultations, they were given one set of dress / shirt / skirt that were donated and collected by other volunteer groups.

I was amaze to see how organize the whole process went. All senior volunteers knew their respective stations and the process. The whole activity went on smooth. In all, I think just for the half day there were approximate 150 patients came and went. The activity started at approx 0800 and ended at about 1130am.

After finishing all the works, we were given a vegetarian lunch box which was good to sooth our hunger. Although the food is really simple, it was tasty and add on the feeling of having helped the patients really put a smile on everyone face.

It was a great feeling to volunteer there. It made me realize how lucky I am to be able to stay in a country which is stable and we can earn a living and need not to become refugees like the people there. They were really pitiful. Some of them were young kids and there were even newly born babies that have to wait for once a month to see the doctors for their progress checkups.
Even though this is the first time of me being a volunteer, I think I will continue to do it as long as I could and get even more active in it. It made me feel like just a few hours of my time on a weekend will be able to significantly improve the quality of life of the needy which really made me felt good.

So, to all of you out there, if you came to know any volunteer groups, do try to volunteer yourself once. I am sure you will feel satisfied that a small token from you will be able to help lots of people live better.