I arrived in Kuala Lumpur just before the beginning of Chinese New Year. This meant two things:
The first, I was introduced to the beautiful and whole-hearted celebrations of Malaysia. Malls were full of dramatic displays, glowing red lanterns adorned the streets, and fireworks lit the sky each evening. One of the schools I taught at put on a CNY party where we made a good luck salad and ate together with all the teachers, volunteers, and children. Immediately, the schools felt like family. These connections continued and strengthened throughout the three months I was teaching there.
Chinese New Year Good Luck Salad
The second, the public holiday gave me time to explore the city and settle in. I passed hours wandering around Chinatown, which was vibrant with life in spite of many of the shops being closed for the holiday. I visited the stunning Batu Caves, and dodged monkeys trying to steal my lunch. Perhaps most importantly, I acclimatised to the time difference whilst preparing for my first lessons.
Art with a class of younger students
I recently completed a physics degree at Oxford, but I taught a range of subjects including English, maths, science, and life skills. There was a large amount of freedom in what I could teach with the classes, so often one lesson could be a combination of many different subjects. The freedom was both exciting and daunting; I could choose topics I thought were important, interesting, and within my knowledge, but the responsibility that came with it could be scary. It was wonderful to see the kids getting creative and out of their comfort zones as well as competitive over who could do the best at: spellings, ‘Countdown’, speech-giving, algebra, Simon says, Uno, and a plethora of other activities and games.
Trip to the park with my science class
Our public speaking class with the YTL scholars
One afternoon, Fam (the headteacher of MRCLC) and I took the children to a park to enjoy the sun and play in the small water park there. Seeing the kids in their element and having a great time was lovely, and by this point I felt truly embedded in the family of the school. Wrangling a bunch of hungry, thirsty, overheating children at the end of the day presented its own difficulties but was definitely worth it for a fun day out.
Trip to the park with MRCLC
In many ways, volunteering was a baptism of fire. Before starting I had some experience with dealing with small groups of children, but my confidence in handling much larger classes increased exponentially. I also felt myself becoming more creative towards the end of the three months, and I think the children appreciated my more experimental lessons, even if they didn’t always work out exactly as I planned! I gained a lot of skills: from teaching and providing pastoral support to the kids, to my own confidence in travelling alone to see more of South-East Asia.
Playing in the water at the park
The end of my time in Kuala Lumpur was also marked by a festival: Eid Al Fitr. The country had become soporific during Ramadan (and I had spent some of that time visiting the beautiful, almost deserted Cherating Beach), but now exploded with joy as most of the city celebrated with their families. Many of my classes threw goodbye parties in my last few lessons, complete with cakes, snacks, and fizzy drinks! For the long weekend at Eid, I took the opportunity to visit my own family in Singapore, for the third time since I’d been in Malaysia.
Celebrating Eid with my uncle, aunt, cousins, and their friends was wonderful, but the lavish parties and enormous, beautiful houses emphasised the massive inequalities that exist in these (and many other) parts of the world. My uncle is a teacher at an international school and seeing the difference in the facilities and level of education available there compared to what the children I had been teaching had access to was heartbreaking. The work that JustVolunteers, the YTL Foundation, and Soroptimist Damansara do is incredible and important. I hope anyone reading this will help to provide the children in KL with the level of education they deserve.
Goodbye party with my GCSE English class