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!
