Goducate was a part of ActivAid’s inaugural conference held last Saturday at the National University of Singapore. Goducate founder Paul Choo led one of the 15 workshops, while the co-founders and other volunteers manned the Goducate booth in the exhibition area.
ActivAid is a conference targeted at health-care students in Singapore and elsewhere to educate them about humanitarian efforts and to spur them into volunteering for such efforts. The conference is organized jointly by the National University of Singapore Medical Society and by Healthcare Expeditions International (HealthEx), a Singapore-based non-governmental organization that identifies, develops, and executes expeditions that health-care students can join to help the needy in various countries. The plan is for ActivAid conferences to be held annually.
For many people, going on a humanitarian expedition is a one-off affair, an experience of a lifetime with wonderful photo-opportunities, but then what? This kind of involvement means much effort and organization for the people on the ground in the host country and much disruption to their work, but in the long run makes little difference to the needy people out there. To drive home this point, the theme for this year’s conference was Sustainability Issues Facing Student Volunteers. Participants thus not only learnt what goes into humanitarian missions, but they were also challenged to think about how, after their return home, they can keep up the good work.
The topic for Paul Choo’s workshop was that merely doling out help to the needy is not charity. Doing so and doing things for them robs them of their dignity and self-worth and makes them overdependent on others, while giving the helpers a false sense of superiority. True, sustainable, charity is helping the needy to help themselves.