Our Small Part to the Community

It is the final week of our course's community project in Seri Kembangan!!! I am absolutely relieved that it is almost over.

Ah... You folks have no clue of what I am talking about, right?

Well, it all started in the beginning of our second year course, where we were told that we will be doing a community project for the residents in Seri Kembangan (SK). We were not too keen about it because it involves working on our precious weekends! Anyway, this is all for the sake of learning!! *I keep on convincing myself that...

And it turns out, it was absolutely beyond my expectations. I expected that this would be just a MINOR event which involves a small community. Ha! Lesson learnt: never underestimate how small a community can be! Initially, we sent out over 600 invitation letters to the residents in SK, inviting them to our FREE health screening programme. When the response was unbelievably low, we had to invite them through the phone. Yes, we had to call them one by one! That took a lot of effort and time. Moreover, it was hard for some people to believe us, especially since there is a lot of scams and trickery going on in this world. It gave us a glimpse of the reality that to trust someone is an issue. It was so bad that we had to do house visits, which means going out there to visit the residents at their doorsteps to tell them that this is not a scam but it is an actual event by our medical faculty. Thankfully, our hard work was worth it as we were able to achieve somewhat enough respondents for our project.

The preparation work took a toll on some of us and our lecturers, as they had to prepare the health equipments, some had to communicate with the head of that community to rent the community hall, poster preparation of the event itself, and doing the proper planning of segregating the work of the students during the health screening. It was tough on those who were the leaders, especially. I am really grateful for their hard work and dedication. Just a side note, this is good for them as managing people can develop better brains! So their sacrifice is not in vain!

All in all, we really did a good job of making this community project a reality. Thank goodness that it went pretty smoothly! Here are some pictures of us in action!

Measuring the blood pressure of the participants - the manual way.

Blood taking was carried out by professional personnel, we 2nd-year students are not allowed to do, which was just sad!

Questionnaires are the most informative way to find out the participants' lifestyle, eating habits and family history.

Tomorrow will be the last day of our health screening programme. Then we will have one more week to prepare for the Health Campaign on 18th September (Sun) as a closing ceremony to our community project and to present the lab results to the participants. Wish us luck!


P.S.
This is us playing around when there is a little free time.

Don't we look serious?

Forcing a smile when we looked absolutely exhausted!!