Plans to Visit Orphanage

Visiting orphanage and old folks' homes is a community service project which was listed in our Maxis CyberlinQ's proposal.

A few of our members were in charge of calling of the orphanage and old folks' home to request for authorisation to visit the home of the orphanage and old folks. But sadly, we called up quite a number of homes and but we still could not secured a permission to visit these homes. As a strategy to secure a permission faster before this holidays end, we decided to just focus on searching for orphange homes.

We tried many ways to get more contacts to be able to get permission to visit these homes. We tried to widen out our horizons by asking our parents, aunts, uncles, friends, teachers and also our friends' parents if they have any contact number of orphanages. We actually tried searching for contacts on the Internet now that in this era that we live in, many things could be done or found on the Internet. In fact, we did managed to get a whole long list of orphanages from the Internet.

There was a few websites that displayed the contacts for the orphanages, example; http://www.hati.org.my/, http://www.jiwang.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1313, http://dir.home.net.my/result/SOC/ORP/WKL/CHR and a few others. But of all, I felt that the list given by http://www.hati.org.my/ was the most helpful website compared to all. It has a list of organisation and homes that need attention, help and also donation from the public. We learnt that some of the homes actually only depend on public donations in cash or kind to these homes to be able to survive. It means without any donations these homes would not be able to run. In http://www.hati.org.my/ , there was also a directory for the public to check out homes for the senior citizens, youth, women and many others.

And that actually made us more determined than ever to help these homes to survive in our society. As I mentioned earlier, we actually had trouble trying to secure a permission. We had tried to call a few house but some said there children were not at the house as during the holidays these kids would be sent to camps. Meanwhile, there was also an orphanage home that said that they were fully booked for visiting on the month of October. Besides that, some said there were busy and could not accomodate our visit on that particular day.

We continued searching, sourcing and we had never given up hope to acquire authorisation from orphanage homes. It finally paid off that we did not give up as I received a call from Mrs. Jaykant. She asked me whether I was still looking for contacts of orphanage homes. I immediately said yes and she gave a number to call. She said that this home was located in Pandan Indah. So, I called this orphanage up and Mrs. Satya answered the call. I told her about my intentions and she refered me to Mrs. Tanamah, who happens to be the advisor of the house. I briefed her about about good intentions, plans and other things regarding the donations. After a short talk, she agreed to let us visit the home. She informed us that this home called Pusat Wawasan was not an orphanage. It was actually a home for children with broken families. And she added that we could only visit the home on Sunday as they were busy on other days. We had no choice but to get everything done by Saturday. It was a Friday when we called her up. I immediately started organising with my group members as soon as I got off the telephone with Mrs. Tanamah.

Firstly, a party was to be planned following intial plans or discusssion. So, I asked a few members to be in charge of the food. My mother had also volunteered to prepare some food for the party. A part from that, some members also were also in charge of buying groceries for the home using the funds accumulated from the recent food sales. Another group member of ours suggested that we should wear the same T-shirts so that we would all will look uniform. So, we had decided to wear the T-shirt that MAC had delivered to us earlier.

Since we had to get everything done by Saturday, there wasn't much time left for us to actually gather volunteers but we still managed to gather 5 volunteers who was willing to help out at the home. More pictures from the trip to the home coming right up.