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“It takes a village.”

By Julai 21, 2014No Comments

It takes a village to raise a child.

The statement couldn’t be any truer than today while I was walking along in Pulau Ketam . Halfway along my journey, my students beckoned me to have a chat with them in a popular seafood restaurant . Sitting next to my students was a well-known villager who is fairly fluent in English.

To my pleasant surprise, he was teaching my students English with a Taiwanese audio system. Turns out, he learned English using this method and was merely sharing resources with my students in hopes that they will improve too. After some discussion, he gave me a file and the audio lessons as resources for my own class.

I was beaming. Grinning from ear to ear like a silly child.

He wasn’t a teacher.
He didn’t have the best resources or the best command of English in the world.
He wasn’t their parents.
He simply wanted the betterment of his community.

Truth to be told, he could have just not done anything to help. I’m so thankful that out of his weekend, he invested in the lives of the younger generation. He did not even charge me, or them, one cent.

If only every Malaysian were to catch that heart and passion , education inequity would be eradicated.

My question is, what are you doing for your community?
Let’s stop complaining and comparing , shall we?

Because if this man can do it, so can you.”

Written by:

TEACH FOR MALAYSIA

One of the main ideas Teach For Malaysia as an organisation has always believed in is that education is everyone’s responsibility; not just the students’, not just the parents’, and certainly not just the teachers’. In this story from 2014 Fellow Anders Cheng, we learn that hope exists in every community — it is up to us to find a way to bring all the pieces of the puzzle together to ensure an excellent education for our kids.

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