Photo provided by 'Optimisitc Me to We' Sung Naiwang, the founder of 'Optimistic Me to We' (3rd from the right) is with voluteer English teachers inluding Richard Dong (second from the left) and Anton Liu (second from the right).
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Anton Liu. My name is Richard Dong. Today we are going to share with everyone who sits here about our volunteer experiences. Every year in Canada, there are over 13.3 million people, accounting 47% the population of it, doing volunteer work. Maybe some work is tiny, but all volunteers are trying their best to make the world more comfortable, more reliable and more beautiful. We are glad to be a part of them. The experiences of last five weeks of teaching the seniors English are really important to us because we really changed our attitude a lot during this time. At first, we are just wondering about to earn out community service hours, then we start to find out how nice all our students are, and finally we even figure out that we also learn a lot from all the seniors and the entire activity.
At first, we just had the idea of “let’s earn some volunteer hour” so we joined this little community. This was both the second year for us in Canada and also the first year in high school. Therefore, we were urgently looking for a long-term volunteer job so that we could complete the requirement of forty-hour community service as soon as possible in order to graduate. When we were really bewildered with it, Ms. Sung came to us and said: “We have a volunteer programs coming up. Do you have any interests about it?” Of course the answer was “yes” at that point. That was how we participated into it.
When we were really beginning our first lesson, we realized we actually got into this little community and started loving it. We still could remember how the feeling was when all these pure eyes were looking at us. We still could remember how the feeling was when they all clapping for us after the little self introduction. That was the first time we stood in front of so many people, expressed our ideas and received respect. That was incredible. Then we started to get to know everyone in our class. They were really kind and they all tried to follow our steps.
But we did not know each other well for the first several lessons. We did not know what they would like to learn, which level were they at… That eventually caused problems because no one wanted to learn what we actually prepared. And this was when we started developing our personal skills. We listened carefully about what their needs were, prepared materials that they liked, and changed our topics timely and correctly if necessary. All there were the qualities and abilities that hard to receive from regular classes in school, but we just made it here.
Once Paulo Coelho, one of the well-known author of New York Times, said, “People never learn anything by being told, they have to find out for themselves”. Due to this program, our attitude about taking up things really changes a lot. We learned that if there is something that we really have to do it anyway, then just do it. Doing it as best as you could therefore you will not find anything regretful. We need to thank for this amazing activity because we are actually learning all types of skills and abilities by ourselves and we both believe that what we did today will lead us into a bright future. Thank you very much. |