But What About the Children?

Last night I attended the Night for SEMOA Charity Dinner at Taylor's College, Subang Jaya. A friend of mine (and fellow Valed) was one of the guys organizing the event, so I decided that I would cough up the RM60 that was required to purchase one of the limited number of tickets. Why not, I thought. Aside from giving to charity, I could also meet up with some old friends and eat some good food while I was at it as well. 

Before I continue, I should probably give you some background information on SEMOA first. SEMOA is a non-profit organization (NGO) focused on improving the livelihood of Orang Asli (indigenous people of Malaysia) children through the Orang Asli Education Centre (OAEC). Among other things, it does things like distribute rice and clothes, build houses, and provide free basic education. (For more information about SEMOA and how you can help out, click here.)

Right, so back to the dinner. It was pretty good, I must admit.

The food - nasi briyani, typically, and complementing dishes like chicken and beef - was nice, albeit limited. The floor layout and organization was well-planned, too, as there didn't seem to be anybody having difficulty moving around or finding their seat. 

The performances were alright, too - some music, as well as a short play. It was just too bad that I could hardly make out what was being sung during the musical acts, though. I blame the lack of sound absorbers in the hall that the dinner was being held in. As for the play, although a bit lacking and predictable in terms of storyline, it still gets my thumbs up due to the good acting.

But anyway, the main thing I would like to highlight from my thoughts on the dinner is this:

With all the good food, performances, and especially the reunion with old friends, many of us may have forgotten what had caused the dinner to be held in the first place - the Orang Asli children.

Around half of the attendees to the dinner were friends of the students who had organized the event. It was then, of course, understandable that they (being technically still teenagers, after all) would be more than a bit excited at meeting one another. So excited, in fact, that they missed out on listening to the one good speech on the night.

Most of the speeches had been given before the actual 'tucking in' began. These were all the usual, boring ones - you know, the words of appreciation, how the event was conceived, and so on. However, after most people had finished eating (I was still munching away on my second helping), it was time for one of the SEMOA representatives to speak on behalf of the organization.

To be honest, I didn't catch half of what the man said, myself. I did get some snippets, however, in which he spoke very well about the importance of education. A very typical and dull topic, you may think, but this guy made it sound interesting. I would have been happy to just sit quietly and listen to him, but it would have been rude to ignore the people who were talking to me at the time.

And indeed, almost everyone was talking throughout the entirety of the speech. The guy sitting next to me at my table (not a Valed; a friend from Manipal who I had invited to tag along, and since the other guys didn't know him, they didn't talk to him much) first brought this observation to my attention, and that realization caused me to feel a slight tinge of sadness. It was almost as if no one cared about the guy up on the stage and behind the podium, or the organization he was representing; the only reason they came to the event was merely to meet up with their buddies.

Credit has to be given to the speaker, though. I'm pretty sure he was fully aware that he was being largely ignored, but he never swayed in his tone and manner. He deserved the hearty round of applause that he got when he was done - although I'm sure that most people only clapped because everyone else was clapping.

Some of the Orang Asli children under SEMOA had actually attended the dinner as well, and in what I presume to be their best clothes (except for a number of them who were dressed for the dance performance they gave at one point during the dinner). It's just as well that they were probably too young to come to the same conclusions that I did, or that would have caused quite some embarrassment on our part.

Then again, my conclusions could be wrong. The organization got RM15, 000 after all, and might not have cared a jot why the people who had donated the money had even done so in the first place. All that money had probably been donated with good intentions anyway, and everyone had just temporarily forgotten all that due to the rising dopamine levels caused by meeting old friends. Maybe I just think too much. I did enjoy meeting my old friends again, and maybe I felt psychologically obliged to somehow feel guilty about enjoying myself.

In any case, the dinner was for a good cause - the underprivileged children of the Orang Asli. Here's hoping that the money donated to that cause will help them to achieve great things in the future.

Reading.

Back when I was a kid, reading was a favorite pastime of mine. I spent countless hours flitting through the pages of numerous books, novels, encyclopedias - basically, anything that had words on it. And by words, I mean English words. I never did feel drawn to anything written in  my native language, for some reason.

I absolutely loved reading. While other kids were running around, watching television, playing with toys and socializing, I was immersing myself in the vast expanses of my own imagination, guided by the words of writers who lived in different countries, continents, and even time periods. It wasn't that I didn't do any of those other things typical of children my age, I just spent a much larger portion of my time surrounding myself with books. 

Books were my constant companions. I recall having sizeable stacks of them with me on my bed, so that I could read myself bedtime stories to put myself to sleep. This never worked, however - I always found myself so intrigued by the book I was reading that I would fight off my drowsiness in order to finish a particular section. 

I suppose it's unsurprising that I didn't have many friends back then. I guess I just didn't find other children to be even half as interesting as any of the characters in the stories I read, or the other marvelous things that I read about in my encyclopedias. No one at that age really cared for any of that, I suppose - at least no one I'd met, anyway. 

As the years passed, I found that I wasn't reading as much as I used to. Part of this I attribute to the fact that I'd read practically every book at home that I'd found to be appealing, and as we didn't buy a lot of new material I'd settle for re-reading the old stuff. Besides that, I had now found friends and discovered a love for football, so these things kept me occupied, away from my books. The fact that school got increasingly harder played its part in all this, too.

I still found time to do my reading, though, albeit not in the way I'd done it in the past. This, you see, was due to my discovery of the internet and the information and knowledge that came with it. I now spent my days roaming Wikipedia and football-related websites in order to fulfill my new, insatiable thirst for knowledge of all things football. As an aside, I read up on chess-related topics as well; I was part of the school team and felt the need to constantly improve myself.

In between all this internet reading, though, I still managed to find time to read in the traditional way. 

However, there came a time when my reading was brought down to an all-time low - this was last year, during my time at Nirwana. I don't recall reading much at all, as I busied myself with friends and my studies. The lack of good new material was, once again, another contributing factor.

Lately, though, I have been getting new books. Things like this are bound to happen when you get a chunk of cash (in the form of book vouchers) from the government to hit the bookstores with.

So now I have all these new books, and I still have half of my semester break left to finish them. Several years ago this wouldn't have been a problem - I completed each of the last three books in the Harry Potter series in under two days. Now, though, it's a different story. I've learned to take my time, for it is only through relaxed calmness that reading can be truly enjoyed.

They say that there's nothing like your first love, and I tend to agree. I love reading, and I don't see how anything's ever going to change that.