Sabah Learning Centers change entire communities
Each time I visit our Sabah learning centers, I’m not only impressed with the transformation of the students but also with how entire communities are transformed.
The most marked change is seen in the community where we started our first learning center (for reasons of security, I will just call our centers by numbers rather than by their names). Two years ago, when I first visited this village it was filthy. There was garbage everywhere. And as I walked through the village, I saw ladies gambling in the verandahs of their broken down houses and unruly filthy children playing in the dirt. The people looked at me in silence and suspicion. I was probably the first foreigner to visit their community.
Last week, as I entered the village, it was as if I had entered the wrong village. The village was clean and tidy. The filthy playground was now totally cemented with nice basketball posts at either end. In that playground was the bright red school house. Around the playground, some of the houses that used to be gambling dens are now used for “spillover classrooms.” This time I saw no evidence of gambling. Some of the gambling den operators are now teachers. In fact, the principal of this 1st center used to be a lottery seller.
As I stood outside one of the classrooms and saw the little slippers of the school kids neatly placed outside, I realized that these little kids had learned the precious lesson of discipline. As I entered the neat tidy classroom and saw the kids diligently writing on their little desks, I bent over to take a closer look at their penmanship and then I heard my fellow-visitor say to me “Their writing is better than ours!”
I could hardly contain my emotions as I thought how this little Goducate learning center had changed an entire community!
Sabah Learning Centers are community projects
Goducate believes in helping Asians to help themselves. Therefore, Goducate projects are usually community projects.
Goducate does not believe in playing the role of a charitable Santa Claus bearing gifts because this type of help breeds laziness. Worse than laziness, it robs the recipients of their dignity as useful human beings.
I was so glad when I visited our Sabah learning centers last week to see how the community was actively participating in educating their own children. When I arrived at our first center, I was glad to see that a nice coat of bright red paint had been added to the center. I was told that the parents had done this on their own accord.
As I sat to watch the welcome program that they had prepared for us that day, I was told that all the decorations were done by the community and the school. I was told that as present building was too small to hold the student body of 400 students, different households had volunteered to open their houses to serve as additional classrooms. I was especially proud to see the local mums teaching their own children – using the teaching techniques and materials that we had given to them. They looked just like the teachers in any other school in the city!
As I went to each of the 5 centers, I saw how each community was actively participating in building and running of the learning centers. In our 2nd Center, I saw that the community had added a new wall to their previously totally “open-concept” school house! They had even extended their school house with zinc sheets taken from a recently torn down nearby building. And the dads had made many more simple desks for the students.
I was so glad to see that the Goducate philosophy of helping poor Asians help themselves was no more just a dream among these “undocumented aliens” of Sabah but had become a reality.