So i went to batam for a medical outreach last saturday, together with ben walt mel, jo and like 50 other ppl. Tsao and nick couldn't join us this time cos they wouldn't be able to book in by the time we returned on sunday.
It was only a two-day trip but I must say it was really meaningful. Some of my friends had the "Woah! You're going to save peoples' lives" response when i told them about this trip. But really, it's nothing like that. All we did was provide some free basic medical screenings and medicine for the villagers in several rural areas (the system of this outreach is such that we rotate among the various villages in batam, visiting 4 villages each time. So ultimately we visit each village like once in half a year or sth).
Most of the volunteers were part of the 'medical' team (nope, no medical experience or knowledge required to be in it). There were a variety of roles: Basic health check (BP, temp, weight, blood test), Doctors (prescribing the appropriate medicine - of course this one need license/ cert/ authorization haha), Dispensers (passing the medications to the patients) and Pharms (stocking up on the various medicine - pouring the cough/vitamin etc syrups into small bottles and cutting the pills). The interesting thing is that not all of the volunteers are from sac. Like this doc called De Han, he's actually a MO in army and he wanted to do some volunteer work so he found out about BMO in the nuh website and decided to sign up for it. So to anyone out there with a weekend to spare and a heart to serve, go ahead and sign up! :)
Mel, jo and me were posted to the 'children's ministry' team. Our role was to play with the children, hand out presents to them and basically make their day :) Language barrier posed as a real concern cos these villagers do not speak english and we do not speak bahasa indon. Thankfully, we had jo who's an indon! So she did most of the communication with the teachers and children. The only words i know in bahasa indo are "satu, dua, tiga, umpat, lima and bagus" haha!
What really struck me was how passionate these children are when it comes to praise and worship, and how little gestures can brighten their day. The conditions of the village we visited were not exactly the best. For instance, the window pane of one of the houses just dropped but the residents were not bothered by it at all, as if it happened all the time. The boys pee anywhere and everywhere out in the open and the children are all very comfortable with the mud (it was raining the whole day). So you can imagine how delighted the children were when we started handing out biscuits, sculpted balloons and soft toys. One of our activities was also distributing toothbrushes/ toothpastes and teaching them how to brush their teeth. Only then did it occur to me that these children might not have such knowledge and some may not even own a toothbrush!
The village we visited
Villagers waiting patiently for their turn
The children all hyped up about colouring, not bothered about the rain and mud at all
Praise and worship at the Bible School
Colouring done by one of the children. Haha so cuteee!!
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