Day 1 At IQ70+ [26 March 2016] Part 1

I swear this is the most extraordinary experience I had in all my life.

So it was the day. Anxious, fidgeted, perplexed, I wasn't too sure of how to describe the feeling that I had in me, but I just held my guts together and there we set off to IQ70+, in the morning after a hearty breakfast at KK7.

IQ70+ wasn't far at all from our university. So it took us only about 5 mins to reach, no extra time for any agitating fidgeting session. Nobody was really ready to face what we were going to face within the next 5 minutes, except Edan who took the stress in his strides and went in to greet an Indian lady. The Indian lady welcomed us, we didn't get to know her name so we just addressed her as Kakak throughout. Kakak was one of the caretakers at IQ70+, she is in her mid 40s, and she's lovely and responsible.

Kakak first brought us to tour around the home and introduced us to all the kids at the home. She was generous to share with us about the name, age and conditions of each of the kid. To be honest, I was slightly taken aback when I knew she was about to take us to have a look at the kids, because I thought Kakak wouldn't want us to do so just as a protective measure. So the kids are just as described in the IQ70+ website, some are mentally challenged, some are disabled, some could take care of themselves and others too, while some needs special care from others. There were two kids who were hyperactive and were chained to keep them from behaving too aggressively. There was one kid who tailed us throughout our tour and looked at each of us intensively, at a super close distance intruding our normal personal cylinder.

Some of us were a little bit chickened out, because this was definitely our first time to meet and to be so close to so many mentally challenged children. 

In fact, not all of them are children anymore, some of them are already adults, but they were mentally challenged and their mental age is probably a child, therefore we regarded them all as children. Kakak then arranged around 15 children to interact with us, because the remaining 25 needed special care and are not physically fit to interact with outsiders.

Music on.

Space out.

And there we started!


Our first activity was to break the ice and warm the kids up. We had gave ourselves nicknames (of animal names) before this, for instance I was Dinosaur, and Edan was Monkey etc. Amirah prepared cards of the animals that represents each of us to be distributed randomly to the kids so that they could be distributed into groups. But apparently it doesn't work that way with mentally challenged children, they can't catch up instructions like this and start working on their own. They needed step by step guide and close supervision by someone beside them. They took the cards, but they didn't move. Therefore we changed our plans according to the situation, and Edan conducted the ice-breaking session. We introduced each of us with our nicknames by imitating the animal and asking them to guess. It wasn't hard and most of them got it right. I doubted if they could remember us even by the nicknames. But it doesn't matter, we weren't here to test their memory.

The ice between us was not really broken yet, and most of them were still passive, so Kakak suggested us to have them all stand up for some dance. So there was another change to our planned programme, that is we added a dancing session before we started the real thing. The kids showed more interest in dancing then. It took us no trouble to get them up for dance. It was funny how, sometimes, being an adult, we were all shy to dance in public but right here, right now, looking at the kids standing up without second thoughts to dance, I guess that is how life should be isn't it? Sometimes we just cared too much about what other people think about us.

First life lesson that the kids taught us: Just be yourself.

The ice was broken more and we then decided to start our planned programmes. So some of us went preparing for weeding and mural painting as assigned, while the rest of us became facilitators for the following sessions. (I was one of the facis.)