Aidah: Giving back to make the world just a little better

Aidah is a frequent volunteer at Mendaki, and we have invited her to share her experiences with us. We hope you enjoy her story and find some inspirations from it!

"What moment made you take the leap to be an avid volunteer?"

I started volunteering with Mendaki since I was 19 while waiting for A Level results to be released. At the time it felt like a chapter of my life was ending and another was beginning. So why not take a leap of faith and commit myself to something bigger than what I knew within my then current bubble of existence? Volunteering had always been something I had really wanted to do consistently before, but didn’t have the time to due to age limitations and school commitments. I became a mentor to secondary school kids just to get a feel of it at first but stayed around because I really wanted to see my kids move up and be something.

"How have you been balancing work and volunteer work at the same time?"

Volunteering is not work haha. It sounds like a lie, but volunteering (be it mentoring or taking part in other ad-hoc events) always feel like a break from actual school work. Sometimes when schedules overlap, I’d weigh whether I’d regret if I didn’t go for a certain volunteering event, and usually the answer is yes, so I would go. It also helps that for now, my mentoring dates and most volunteer events are limited to the weekends, so I don’t have to sacrifice actual school hours.

"Some things you'd like to share with other youth such as yourself about the world of volunteering?"

You are going to meet some really good people and make some really good friends. If you’re willing to come out of your shell and are open to having conversations with others, you’re going to meet people you would never come across in your day-to-day life and these connections will surprise you. I’ve made friends with people I never thought I ever would simply because we were determined to work together for a certain cause.

On an uglier note, administrative barriers can sometimes sour the act of volunteering itself. There will be certain ideas you put forth that higher-ups won’t like because it costs too much, or its not deemed “safe”, and sometimes just doesn’t make sense. So it’s not always going to be great. But whenever I start to feel jaded I force myself to remember why I began volunteering in the first, and evaluate whether its still worth it. For me, it still is.

"Things people may not know or expect when they volunteer"

You think you’re helping out whatever beneficiary you were volunteering for, but honestly the person you’re helping the most is yourself. I was completely taken aback in the first year of mentoring when I realized I knew so little of the world. These 13-year-olds, kids in my mind, whether knowingly or not, were the ones who taught me that. My kids weren’t from the best of backgrounds, so when I listened to their stories it really woke me up to how privileged I was. Up until I was 19, I thought everything could be fixed if they studied a little harder, strived a little higher. It baffled me why it was so difficult for “Malay kids” to progress. Were they just not smart enough?

Yet I knew from the first session my kids were smart. Just not in the ways it counted in our school system. And that opened my eyes to our broken system, and so many other things. They’re still teaching me so many things, its crazy.