Reflective E-Journal

 

Through this project, I gained new perspectives about our society in general. To be completely honest, I don’t consider myself an animal enthusiast, some might say I am even a little stone-hearted towards the lovely animals. I do find them adorable but I am not a fan of keeping them around. I am also thoroughly oblivious about animal shelters and how they even work. I thought the shelters would house stray fur kids, and people will just come adopt them and it goes as simple as that. I never truly realise how difficult it would be to rescue, house, & take care of the innumerable stray animals scattered all around our society environment.

 

I am aware that businesses & the economy around the world were thrown into panic when the unforeseen global pandemic hit us like a bolt of deadly lightning, but I overlooked how non-government organisations would be the worst victims. This module is truly crucial as it gave every student a chance to be more socially involved, and opened up our eyes to the real world and what’s happening beyond our safety bubbles. The NGOs faces daily struggle of achieving self-sustainability even before the Covid-19 epidemic, one can only imagine how much worse it could be afterwards.

 

In this particular project, I am lucky to be teamed up with a group of passionate and sympathetic animal lovers. We selected our NGO to be an animal shelter right away and quickly chose a shelter that we might be able to contribute some help in this limited period of time. Through in-depth research, and also interviews, we found out the animal shelter, Second Chance Animal Society (SCAS), faces immense difficulties especially after the pandemic. Hospitality, medical treatments, fund raising, were some of the largest problem any animal shelter faces. The Movement Control Orders caused transportation problem and completely eliminated the chance of volunteer workers to excess the shelter without permits. Everyone was having personal problems, and those who are able to take care of the stray animals are as heroic as the front liners.

 

During the project, I found out each and everyone of us has something to learn from each other, we all hold traits that is crucial to form a successful team to complete a project. For example some of use are extroverts, and most are introverts. Both parties compliment each other and the tasks are explicitly distributed through our personalities. The more outgoing ones would be able to interview the NGO verbally whilst the others are responsible to be constructive and keep the us grounded with our tasks.

 

This project also taught us the power of social media and how the digital era is taking over our lives. With the advantage of social media, we were actually able to reach out to collaborators and common animal lover communities nationwide. We were able to connect people from Johor, Penang, and as far as Sabah to our beneficiary. In short we envision to connect the animal lover community in a larger scale and get people together without being physically present which is rational with the current situation. We know that the six of don’t have the power to bring everyone together but our project did proved that with a little bit of commitment, it is definitely achievable if everyone do the same. I sincerely hope that in this era, and with the current circumstances that the human race all face together, we are able to be closer and be more socially aware utilising the technologies we have.