In March 2020, the covid-19 pandemic hit the whole country of Malaysia and caused chaos. There was disruption in education with school closures.
Despite all the drastic changes, which many people had to adhere to, we managed to slowly adapt to the unexpected situations. For our education programmes, we had to quickly change our programmes to be conducted in community halls. Programmes started in schools were postponed and we conducted online classes for those who were able to join. It was sad to see some students were unable to join the online classes due to lack of access to the internet and mobile devices.
Schools in the rural areas were distributing homework at the guardhouse to parents for the students. Many students were affected as there were lack of access to the internet due to infrastructure, lack of money to top-up internet data and lack of mobile devices to be shared with siblings at home.
Fortunately, many parents, schools and community leaders were very cooperative when our programmes were allowed to start for the benefit of the school children, who have missed out on their learnings.
It was quite challenging to get the students back to the study mode and momentum. Students were too comfortable “not learning” and enjoyed staying home doing nothing.
It was our mission to restart to motivate our participants to enjoy learning. We incorporated many activities, games and exercises to make learning fun and exciting. We started to create awareness about the covid-19 pandemic amongst the students for them to understand what they were going through in this challenging times affecting global communities.
