So we had 10 hours left upon completion of our volunteering activities at IQ70+, and we had decided to volunteer in Zombie Escape, a charity explorace which is organised by the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology (FSKTM), University of Malaya, to raise funds for the Haemophilia Society of Malaysia, in conjunction with the World Haemophilia Day.

It is estimated that 3000 Malaysians suffer from Hemophilia. That is one in every 10,000 Malaysians. Unfortunately, the number of the diagnosed patients is just 1000 (roughly 34%). 66% of hemophiliacs aren’t aware of it. That’s just not okay, and we can’t live with it. Hence there were a total of 100 first year Computer Science and IT students organising the World Hemophilia Day 2016 in UM. World Hemophilia Day charity event by Computer Science and IT students of University Malaya, in collaboration with Hemophilia Society of Malaysia. It aims to raise the public awareness for Hemophilia.

World Hemophilia Day: http://www.wfh.org/en/whd
Hemophilia Society of Malaysia: http://www.hsm.org.my/

We were so excited and felt proud to be part of this mission, because we volunteered to become Zombies to hinder the participants away by scaring them out during their games!

We started off our day 2 at 10am too. Unlike yesterday, it was easier to get along with the kids today because they had already known us.

Upon reaching IQ70+, Vinod and Kin Mun proceeded with weeding again after settling down, and Jia Lin and the team decided to paint a second mural on another wall since there were leftovers of the mural paint. While the rest of us remained being facilitators to facilitate the interactive games for today.

Like yesterday, we danced with the children as warming up, and then commenced our first game which is Chui Mei (we found no appropriate English name for this activity, but here's what Chui Mei is all about: it is a type of Chinese art by blowing drops of ink on a paper into tree branches, and then add some petals to it to make it into plum plants)

So our first Interactive game with the children today was doing collages. Kakak had told us not to leave the children with scissors so earlier that morning we cut our prepared materials for them beforehand.


Amira was in charged of conducting this session, while the rest of the facilitators (xxx, xx, and xxx) facilitates the game. There were 3 types of craft to be done, first was coloring a pizza, second one was to cut and paste some stickers to form a picture of a garden, and the third one was to create a big collage of any shape the children like. The children were distributed into 4 groups, according to their own preference because apparently our usual way of random distribution doesn't work on them, they need to stick with somebody they feel comfortable with. Zi ying and I were facilitating the same group, while xxx and xxx ____.

There were 4 children in me and Zi Ying's group. They are all girls, all of them are already 17 years old and above. They are quiet and obedient so it wasn't really hard for me and Zi Ying to guide them. Nonetheless this is our very first time of interacting with mentally challenged children, we didn't know how to approach them to make them feel comfortable interacting with us. My usual way of bridging the gap with someone unfamiliar was to just have some light conversation, so I guess maybe I could try it. I mean, how different are they from us, they could definitely still communicate right.

And so I asked them about their daily routine, like what time they wake up everyday, what do they do everyday, do they usually have youth volunteers like us and etc. Lisa was the relatively smarter one among the four of them. She could give me clear information like there are universities students coming here from time to time. She tried to mention some university names, one of them was University Malaysia which I assumed she meant University of Malaya. (Kakak told us before that we had seniors doing social engagement here too) What caused me to feel a little bit embarrassed was when I was told that they wake up at 6am everyday. I asked Lisa if they just wake up naturally at this time or somebody wakes them up.

"Of course we woke up by ourselves, why do we need to be waken up?" Lisa asked me back with utterly innocent and bewildered tone.

Well, you would never know that we university students are a special kind of species that some of us would even fail to wake up with 10 alarms ringing together at once. Right here right now I wanted my life to be as simple as theirs so badly.

So coloring the pizza wasn't hard, except that one member in my group was not socialable that she took one whole piece of the paper to be colored by herself only and the rest of the group members are forced to share another one. Zi Ying and I did not help them at all with the coloring since they already knew how to do it, and the outcome was a pleasant one. each and every one of the children had produced uniquely beautiful masterpieces.

Well, who said pizzas can only be brown/orange/yellow/golden in color?

Second life lesson that the kids taught us: Never limit your innovation by stereotypes and orthodox.

As for cutting and pasting the garden, it wasn't hard too, because Zi Ying and me cut the stickers out for them beforehand. Again, the children didn't care about the trees floating in the air, or the flowers being pasted upside-down. The garden that they produced were amusingly wonderful. It might not make so much logical sense to us limited-minded grown ups, but it was definitely peculiarly pleasant to our eyes. It somehow brought us a sense of freedom, to know that there are still people in this world that welcomes all kinds of possibilities.


After lunch and prayers, we carried out the third task which is to do a big collage. The children had no specific request for any shape they like, so I said don't we make a collage of a flower (for our group). And it was an easy task too, each and every one of them had fun tearing and pasting the color papers onto the white mahjung paper.






And we called it a day at 4pm sharp because the children needed rest. Our Day 1 at IQ70+ is fruitful, meaningful and inspiring. It was magical, because it was our very first time interacting with such children. We were uncertain when we first started, we cracked our heads about how to approach them and interact with them, how to make the children understand our instruction in the simplest possible way. In fact we found ourselves feeling a little bit mentally exhausted after the first three hours being there. But finally we made through day 1 successfully! The children did not reject us, and we actually fostered some bonding with them. We had never felt so magical in all our lives, that we were actually able to color up the lives of some forgotten people in this society. In this city of lights, we strive to improve ourselves, but today, we are reminded to bring this small population of the society along with us on our journey of improving for a better tomorrow. What we did might seem insignificant and immaterial in this whole wide world, but we believe, as we go along, together we would make a significant change to this society in the end.

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.)

Hi, it's been so long since we last posted here. We progressed a lot since our last update, it's time to catch everything up now.

So we did not get an official reply from Shelter Homes till then, and we decided that it would be better if we just embark on liaising with an alternative NGO instead.

Guess what? Tomorrow is the actual day that we're going to carry out the first few hours of our 30-hour social engagement practicals!

Here's the place that we're going to tomorrow. IQ70plus.


[A little bit about IQ70plus here. Writing about it soon. ]

This morning we gathered at Dataran Zaba to 

Since IQ70plus is a shelter for mentally challenged children, I decided to prepare myself mentally too for what is coming tomorrow. Google had always been my best pal so naturally I Googled about this shelter and visited its official site to read up a lil' bit about them. Their webpage is a very pleasant looking one, and it didn't took me much trouble to reach their page of introducing all the residents of the shelter. This page listed down some basic information about every one of them. There are 40 residents, their age ranged from 6 to 51 years old.

Most of them are as claimed, mentally challenged. Not many of them are children though. Some of them are already grown ups. Some of them are mentally challenged because they had serious case of fever when they were babies. Some of them fell and knocked their head when they were infants. One of them is hyperactive. One of them tends to self-hurt. One of them doesn't like wearing clothes and tends to tear the clothes off if he finds any on himself. Something in me made sure I read everything available about every one of them.

 There are also 3 pages telling stories of 3 children exclusively. Three children with three different stories that are equally heart-shattering. Each of them are here for a reason. They certainly did not choose to, but this is probably the only best alternative for them at the moment.

There's this sentence in one of the paragraphs:

"The story of a single parent and a retarded child. This is so familiar to us, but it actually happens, right around us. No one had chosen to become the characters of this story."

 I could literally hear my heart shattering into countless pieces. No one chose to, but they were chosen to.

How lucky I must be to be chosen by God to become who I am today. Remember the times I complained about having too much homework and too little time to sleep? Remember the times that I skipped classes? Remember the times that threw away food leftovers without batting an eye? Remember the times that I thought I felt empty to live in this big city? I couldn't help but question myself who is the retarded one for not being contented of what I have.

I was so filled with empathy towards them. However I guess it's best to not feel pity of them. They do not need our pity. They don't wish to be treated specially, they crave to be normal. No one is born identical, we should just embrace their difference and accept for who they are. Offer them help wherever possible, because what's this world without compassion and helping each other?




Tomorrow I'm going to meet them in person and interact with them.It's a chance for me to care for the forgotten lot by God, a chance to express my humanity, to leave some warmth in this big cold city.

Be kind, be nice, don't discriminate, we're here to help. May everything goes smoothly tomorrow =)