Author: Clarisse

When the trainees at the Goducate Training Center in Iloilo, Philippines, graduate and are sent out as community development workers, they need to be able to quickly establish rapport with the members of the community, and they need to be able to think out of the box when they encounter an unfamiliar situation. To help the trainees acquire such skills, they were put through a week of extremely unusual training that involved learning to tell jokes and to do magic tricks.

The trainer for this course was Dr Low Lee Yong, founder and chief executive officer of MHC Asia, which is Goducate’s largest corporate sponsor. Dr Low came from a very humble background and struggled against all odds to achieve his dreams of doing medicine. After a short spell as a general practitioner, he started MHC Asia, a third-party administrator which now links over 1000 clinics in Singapore and which has won many entrepreneurship awards. Early this year Dr Low published his autobiography, I Dare to Dream. He has become a much-sought-after motivational speaker, who keeps his audience engaged with his informal, jocular style of delivering his message.

At the Goducate Training Center, Dr Low inspired the future community development workers to dream big through the sharing of his life experiences growing up in a poor village. His humble beginnings also drove home to the trainees that there is hope for the children in the poor communities they serve. His training sessions were practical and productive. He shared practical tips on public speaking and gave the trainees opportunities to speak.

Joke time was rather challenging for most of the trainees because they were unused to jokes about other cultures, and also because they did not grasp some of the jokes. However, they learnt how jokes can be used to emphasize major points. What the trainees also found very interesting were those bridge-building activities to engage people over a meal. For example, they learnt how to make paper roses with tissue paper, how to balance a coke can on its rim, and how to do magic tricks using easily available items such as coins,notes, name cards etc.

When Dr Low went along to the villages where the trainees do their community work, they saw how his fun-loving approach helped to build up rapport with the community.

On the last day of Dr Low’s stay at the Goducate Training Center the trainees were broken up into teams to compete in all that they had learnt from him. We hope that this little course will result in community development workers who can attract, talk, and inspire anyone in any crowd.

Goducate Training Center in Iloilo, Philippines, is where Goducate trains people to be community development workers, who can be sent out to help needy people help themselves. Since Goducate expects people to be eventually helping themselves, it is only right that the Goducate Training Center should aim to help itself—ie, to be self-sustaining. For this reason, the Center houses many recreational facilities, such as a swimming pool, ziplines, a wall for rock climbing, a fishing area, so that we can open the place to paying visitors.

Agriculture is part of the training given at the Goducate Training Center. What Goducate is now planning to do is to offer educational tours, some with a focus on agriculture and farming. Visitors will come to learn that farming can be fun and is do-able in many settings.

In preparation for these educational tours, we brought in the locals from the neighboring communities to help set up the place, and to learn at the same time. They had fun learning how to prepare the soil mixture, which is made up of garden soil, carbonized rice hull, and vermin cast, and helping with the planting of vegetables, ornamental plants, and cuttings, and transferring things to the nursery.