Date: April 19th, Saturday (7 a.m. – 7 p.m.)
Venue: Dataran Kemerdekaan, Shah Alam (behind PKNS/Library/Shah Alam Mosque)
More pictures at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hazwani/
Perhaps I shall start by stating the reason behind the carnival. As part of Young Mercy syllabus, we are required to organize a Volunteer Awareness Programme (which basically meant a programme to create awareness in public) and at the same time making it a charity project to raise fund for our chosen organization/body. YM1 chose to donate part of their profit (and mind you they did raise quite an amount of money) to Pernim and the rest for their future project next year. We decided to use our profit for the 2 orphanages we visited in Perak earlier this year as part of our continuous effort with orphans. As for awareness programme, our Health Carnival centred around 3 most common modern ‘killers’ in Malaysia- Hypertension, Obesity and Diabetes.
And I’d firstly liked to thank and congratulate the higher committee of YM2 especially Eda and Anuar for their continuous and endless effort to make sure that the programme ran smoothly. It was indeed a huge success; with some members already at the site since Friday to set up the place and I myself went back to Cyber at 3 in the morning (and came back to Shah Alam at 7 a.m., a few hours after that for some rest/last minute job at home)
The day started with an aerobic session. What initially started off with only 30-40 people from an invited fitness group- 3 in 1 Fitness Group (who did weekly aerobic in Shah Alam) plus some of the YM members, turned out to be a mass aerobic session by mid-of-the session. We then had performances (gendang group, zapin, choral speaking, silat performance and nasyeeds) by invited schools around Shah Alam/KL. I think inviting schools to do their performances was a lot better than to invite/pay artists to come; for once, they’re on time and made no hassle...
Opening ceremony saw YB Dr. Halimah Ali, Selangor State Excutive Council Member officiated our carnival, followed by her speech and Prof. Ikram’s. Medical Check-Up (led by Zeti) had already began an hour before and so did the rest of the activities including Health Exhibition Booth (handled by Hannan, Randal and the gang); Aamir’s Khadani Boutique booth (and batik shows); booth selling foods/goods and promotional activities including Petronas Gas; basketball shooting trials & shooting football into goal; colouring contest and telematch for kids and open-participation treasure hunts (I know some Foundy, first year and silat people were enjoying themselves running around, looking for clues and whatnot). We also had health talk, CPR educational demonstration/training, lucky draw and AutoShow (run by Unimac?).
Special thanks to all our sponsors (MBSA, Petronas, An-Nur Specialist Hospital, Puteri Anwar Clinic, Syarikat Beras Faiza, Nestle, KPJ, Khadani Batik, Alam Flora (for cleaning up the area afterwards) and personal donors). Also another special thanks for the volunteers, our helpful first years in Medical Check-Up, kind volunteers from Medical Science Club from Management & Sciences University (MSU) and some of our dedicated colleagues from YM1. They really helped a lot. And not forgetting the doctors involved in Medical Check-Up consultations who would stay from morning till 6 in the evening!
I couldn’t even comment on every activities that were there because I myself was in charged of catering and multitasking with a bit of PC’s (Programme Coordinator) job… the ones that I got to go and try was a few food stalls, the batik-canting try and watched some performances. (I didn’t even get to see the cars displayed in AutoShow!)
But a few things for sure- the crowd was there, people were enjoying themselves (and I’m not just talking about us- the kids loved the colouring contest and telematch- I had parents coming asking where the booth was because their children wanted to participate), the autoshow was hot, medical check-up was full and BLS/CPR booth was swamped with people all the time.
However, I think the one memory that wasn’t simply replaceable was the moments after the Carnival- we stayed till 3 in the morning to dissemble the tents and sent everything back where they belonged (that means 3 trips to Seputeh from Shah Alam back and forth). The most touching part was that the commitment and voluntarism that YM1 members showed to us- that they stayed with us all the way till everything settled. The boys went home at 5 in the morning because they were the ones to follow the lorry to Seputeh.
The rest of the girls (and some boys) stayed to guard the rest of the stuff. Recalled I said that note how many tents YM1 had? Yeah, we had almost 15 tents- most were assembled by the boys themselves but at the end of it, we all stayed together till we formed the ‘human-chain’ in the middle of the road to load the tents on the lorry and cleaning up the area.
Things were even a bit more complicated than it seemed because initially we had the whole road in the Dataran closed for ourselves but as night progressed, we were only left with one lane when cars started coming in and MBSA couldn’t do anything to stop the traffic.
In which then this astounded me a little as to the later the night sailed away, the more people seen around the Dataran. I guess for me, the confusing thing was they weren’t even doing anything except for parking their cars and sat by the road watching other people.
People could be weird when they wanted to, right?
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