CCA Fair

The annual CCA fair was held 22 Nov @ Ngee Ann City... MINDS being part of CCA definitely came in full force to support the event...




MINDS MYG has a game stall...




Earlier on, we participated in the walkathon

Outing to Marina Barrage

15 Nov, we went to Marina Barrage... the latest downtown icon that was officially opened on 1 Nov http://www.pub.gov.sg/Marina/Pages/default.aspx

Thanks to Zhuting & Yiting for organising this outing and being our "tour guides" :)

... All these years ...

I should be writing this post in English but somehow I am in the mood to write in Chinese ... (I guess I express myself better in Chinese than English =p)

前几天，我个朋友问我－你还记得你第一天来到BKTG的情况吗？
想一想，发现10年就这样过了。。。
我很清楚地记得我第一天到ＢＫ的时候，那时候我们还是借住在Special O的地方。
一进去就看到很多大姐姐和大哥哥很专心的照顾着Trainee ... 一点都不需要任何人来提醒他们现在应该做哪些事情。。。从他们的身上，我学到了很多。。。
而我也是在那个时候慢慢的培养一个习惯 - 就是研究其他的人，然后慢慢的把技术学起来。。。

当是的我只有17岁 。。。 我真的不知道也不记得为何那个年纪的我，可以那么的专心的在BK.
之后因为某种原因，我离开了3或4年。

在2005 年四月，我决定找回我人生很重要的这一部份！
在当时年纪轻轻的我来说，BK对我的影响很深。
所以我终究离不开BK的。。。

每个礼拜看到我们的学生，我的心情就会好很多。。
虽然我们常常必须教他们很简单的事情而且可能要重复很多遍。。我还是很愿意。。。
就像简单的数学在作业簿上的练习和实际的用铜板来给他们算钱是没有一定的连接的。。。
他们能在作业簿上把2+3答对不代表他们会明白两块加三块。。
这是我们大家都要慢慢学习。。。

希望BK能努力加油。。。
等下我就要放假去了 。。。
我会想念大家的

Something to Share ...

Just wanted to share this with all of you ....
-------------------------------------------------

A blind boy sat on the steps of a building with a hat by his feet. He held up a sign which said: 'I am blind, please help.' There were only a few coins in the hat. A man was walking by. He took a few coins from his pocket and dropped them into the hat. He then took the sign, turned it around, and wrote some words. He put the sign back so that everyone who walked by would see the new words.

Soon the hat began to fill up. A lot more people were giving money to the blind boy. That afternoon the man who had changed the sign came to see how things were. The boy recognized his footsteps and asked, 'Were you the one who changed my sign this morning? What did you write?'

The man said, 'I only wrote the truth. I said what you said but in a different way.' What he had written was: 'Today is a beautiful day and I cannot see it.'

Do you think the first sign and the second sign were saying the same thing?

Of course both signs told people the boy was blind. But the first sign simply said the boy was blind. The second sign told people they were so lucky that they were not blind. Should we be surprised that the second sign was more effective?

Moral of the Story: Be thankful for what you have. Be creative. Be innovative. Think differently and positively.

Invite others towards good with wisdom. Live life with no excuse and love with no regrets. When life gives you a 100 reasons to cry, show life that you have 1000 reasons to smile. Face your past without regret. Handle your present with confidence. Prepare for the future without fear. Keep the faith and drop the fear.

Great men say, 'Life has to be an incessant process of repair and reconstruction, of discarding evil and developing goodness.... In the journey of life, if you want to travel without fear, you must have the ticket of a good conscience.'

The most beautiful thing is to see a person smiling...
And even more beautiful is, knowing that you are the reason behind it!!!

-Fan Han

My experience at BKTG

I am writing to share with you guys what volunteering is like at the Basic Knowledge Training Group and how the experience had been for me personally. Recruitment is in full swing and hopefully, writing this would encourage more people to step up as we are perennially short of volunteers. However, this is not propaganda but is primarily about the real people, real experiences and real relationships that I had seen in the short time I had been here.

Many of you may have the impression that intellectually disabled people are hard to handle and harder to befriend. Indeed, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was getting myself into when I signed up and can’t help but wonder if I am able to get comfortable with them. On my first few visits, seeing the volunteers taking good care of the trainees and treating all behavioural issues with patience and understanding was a deeply humbling experience. The trainees can be hard to manage at times and very often, they show little progress despite the best efforts. These people know what real charity is and are willing to care for the trainees totally unrelated to them, taking only satisfaction in the fact that they had alleviated some burden for the care-takers and let the trainees enjoy a happier time.

When I started engaging with the trainees, I did have doubts that the activities we organised did not register with them, since they don’t talk and generally don’t do as they are told. However, during parting time, it was very surprising and heart-warming to see one or two trainees give a smile and wave you goodbye. It does feel good to be appreciated and have a special bond with your trainee! All in all, most of the trainees are not too difficult to take care, and there are always other friendly volunteers around to help out in tricky situations.

Lastly, I must mention the awesome BKTG volunteers. They do feel like one big family in disguise! Besides the regular dinners and occasional drinking sessions, they are great fun to be around with and are there for you when you need advice (or simply someone to listen to heartbreak stories). It is quite amazing to see how much camaraderie the volunteers have in spite of the gulf in backgrounds. I think if there is just one special factor that bonds people to BKTG, it has to be the enormously meaningful relationships between volunteers here. Individually, our small and little baby efforts may count for little. But together, we made the world a much happier place for all the trainees under our care.

-Weiliang

Open House - 3 Jan 09

As most of you might know by now, we are planning our very first open house on 3 Jan 09. The objectives behind this open house

1. Conducting volunteer recruitment;
2. Creating public awareness of people with intellectual disabilities

The primary focus of the open house is to recruit volunteers to sustain the running of the project! It is well documented that over the years, BKTG has volunteers shortage and if we don't do something drastic now, it might not even be able to sustain its service, not to mentioned providing quality service to the special people!

We will be sending out posters/flyers to be posted in CC with close proximity to TGS. In addition, we will be distributing flyers to Kembangan estate, linking up with CDC. Banners will also be displayed at TGS & near Kembangan MRT. This is to reach out to the public.... (we are targetting another Open House for nearby schools/JCs/Polys in late Feb)

On the day itself, we will invite those who registered with us to visit our project! On the day itself, we will have an opportunity to showcase what a difference volunteers can make to the life of our trainees. Also, to show to the public, the hidden talents of our trainees.

If you have any comments/suggestions for the open house, pls let Choon Seng, Jianyun or Fan Han know.

Thanks.

Like anyone of us, our trainees will feel unwell, will fall sick. Sometimes we have difficulty explaining the pain we are suffering, describing the discomfort to the doctors, we are also potentially ignorant to alot of medical symptoms that warrant early attention and treatment.

What happen to our trainees? Without equipping them with the necessary communication skills, they will only suffer silently, the people around may not be able to pick up the symptoms much early, the doctors will not able to give a more accurate diagnosis. (Luckily, Jee Ban's case was exceptional, was detected and handled appropriately... thanks to the fine work & vigilant of our volunteers.)

Without relevant/sufficient communication skill, our trainees will also not be able to express how to feel, protest what they don't like, manage their emotion as they seek to be understood from those around them.

It may not be easy to build up the communication skills of our trainees & they may not be able to pick up the skills. For those who can pick up at least one form of communication skill, it will help them... for those who can't, its not the end yet. If we are observant and sensitive to their behaviour, any slight change from the norm, we could be able to sense it and study into it carefully =)

3 months and no posting... is this blog going to end? Maybe...people might have forgotten about its existence...

===================================

Every sat afternoon, I look forward to class. Lesson starts 3pm but I usually reach around 2.30pm. Some teachers would have reached and there is Desmond, CK, SM, JB and SP. Before lesson starts, teachers would be playing songs such as country music (e.g. top of the world, take me home country road) and SM would sway his body, clap and nod his head, or chinese songs (e.g. 小薇, 老鼠爱大米) and we could see Tim singing and enjoying himself. Most of us would dance to the music because genetically, we like music. In the last class, we started to play remote control car... ha ha and WL was so poor in it.

Class starts with sing-along to prepare us for the day and get us into mood...

Adapting to change...

It has been sometime since I last come on board... haha because my PC giving me some problems, finally resolved =) [Is your machine giving you problem? If not, why aren't you writing? Nothing worth discussing regarding BK/MYG? Maybe we should make sure everyone post something in the blog on a regular basis ;D]

Pat and I met up with some MYG volunteers during a gathering for a ex-volunteer who is now working in Bahrain. Ha ha quiet a good mix, volunteers from AMK, RO, WE, BK... almost EP (but Huafang can't make it last min). Beside updating each others, we just never stop talking about MYG, our clients, our volunteers.... haha, a group of senior volunteers still so active for MYG :p

AMK and BK were projects set up the earliest, we are 25 this year & AMK, 26th. Both have almost identical clients profile because we were set up for the same objective but serving clients from different parts of the island.

We faced the same issues such as ageing trainees, volunteers shortage, objectives/lessons for our trainees... fortunately, MYG is setting up task force to look into the ageing issues and if you have any views just let me know.

Volunteers retention is always an issue for both projects, primary reason is our trainees' profile and then follow by volunteers' profile. We can't change our trainees' profile because the project exist for that reason. But we can definitely adapt to the changing profile of volunteers. We will have to manage volunteer's expectation much differently compared to the past. In addition, more and more VWOs are coming out and "competition" for a already limited pool of volunteers are getting tougher. How are we going to do that? Ha ha, we really have a good discussion on this and I shall keep it for discussion with the committee.

Objectives/lessons for our trainees. Do you know MYG projects (especially the 1st 5 projects) follow almost an identical programme - singalong, individual lesson, vocational training (which we changed it to PE/handicraft a few years ago) , tea break? We replaced vocational training to PE/handicraft as we felt back then that there is no longer a need to do headphone coiling for group B & C trainees since they are unlikely to work in EDC and physical exercise is a good form for them to sweat it out & stay fit =) This is an example of change.

Year in year out, GLs will discuss within the group to formulate new training programme for their trainees and if we observed closely, what's done now might have already been done 5-10 years ago. Also, we are running out of ideas on what types of programme are going to be useful for our trainees. We agreed that doing academic stuff is no longer relevant for our ageing trainees, we might have to focus on some life skill, self-care! And we also felt that it can be rather stressful for our volunteers to plan for programmes that our trainees will enjoy (fresh, creative tasks to attract and substain interest?). In the end, we felt doing recreational, social interaction activities might be something worth considering, beside making lesson fun for trainees, volunteers will also enjoy & prefer facilitating such activities. [Ha ha a win-win situation for trainees & volunteers] Within BK, we have been doing individual lesson cum games/interactive activites for our trainees... that's great & hope we can continue to do well and grow the project

Maybe we should expand our network, have more such discussions, finding out more from other projects and learn from each other. Together, we can adapt ourself to the changing time and progress....


-choon seng

PS: You can consider writing something on our coming 25th anniversary... we are 25 this year!

The curious incident of the dog in the night-time...

... Siobhan has long blong hair and wears glasses which are made of green plastic. And Mr. Jeavons smells of soap and wears brown shoes tha have approximately 60 tiny circular holes in each of them....

... Mostly I read books about science and maths. I do not like proper novels. In proper novels people say things like, "I am veined with iron, with silver and with streaks of common mud. I cannot contract into the firm fist which those clench who do not depend on stimulus." What does this mean? I do not know....

The policeman said, "I am going to ask you once again..."

I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that Father calls groaning. I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world. It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all you can hear and then you know you safe because you cannot hear anything else.

The policeman took hold of my arm and lifted me onto my feet.

I didn't like him touching me like this. And this is when I hit him.

How did the above sound to you? These are extracts from the novel title "The curious incident of the dog in the night-time" by Mark Haddon. Some of you might have read it. So what's so special about this book?

-choon seng

A colourful way of life...

"..gunshot bang bang... XXX on the floor.." .... haha I only managed to kill one =)

That's something for the volunteers during our annual camp for our trainees... a game that's adding the element of fun and creating the excitment among the volunteers (while they took care of our trainees during the camp)!

The props for the activities were beautifully made, with obvious effort (i meant alot of effort) spent to complete them. The programmes were fun, innovative and easy for our trainees to enjoy... the handicraft were well designed and planned for them take back for memory!

Well.... below is the committee who made the camp enjoyable for our trainees and volunteers!

Thank you girls!



There is no surprises from our trainees during the camp... the usual laughter and excitment were generated among them... I am sure even Weibin enjoyed himself =)



A moment for us to remember.... for the first time, the caregivers joined us for the camp break!



-choon seng

Brand new year !

It's 2008 !
A brand new year ~

A big thank you to all for all the efforts placed in 2007 ...
35th Anniversary is a success !
And now we are - MINDS MYG (Serving persons with Intelluctual Disability)
The photos and video will be released some time after Chinese New Year !

Radiance has undergone a big revamp.
I have posted it under this link ... do take a look !
(It's very nicely done !)

http://bktgmyg.googlepages.com/Radiance.pdf

~Fan Han~