During the first month of being in the service health serve, we have definitely encountered more challenges than achieved success. It was an unfamiliar experience for me as in all my previous services, I was told what I should be doing and given a guideline – there wasn’t really any situations where I had to come up with ideas and actually implement them. The challenges we faced were

• communication with the head of healthserve as we basically exchanged one email each week which wasn’t sufficient and we were just circling around the same point
• organisation amongst ourselves because we haven’t come up with our own roles and responsibilities until just recently and that to say the least was simply too late
• timings weren’t ideal as us and the migrant brothers weren’t quiet ready to meet at school so we were planning on meeting where they were more comfortable but the timings were mostly during school hours

Something I learnt during all of this happening in the first 5 service meetings was that not everything will be set up perfectly for us in whatever situation we’re in and sometimes we just need to improvise and act quickly in accordance to the situation.

Being in a part of this healthserve service community during these times has not all been that bad for me though. Along with the above point I’ve learnt, I have also developed a new skill in sort of a role model in the group. Although I’m not directly a chair or vice chair of the service, I’ve realised after my service teacher had told me that what I do within the service impacts what others do as they might look at me for guidance or feel the need to do something if I do. This made me think that if I were to goof around and act uninterested, so might others which made me decide that I should probably be more careful about the small little things I’m doing while I might think that my job in the service is done because that might lead to another person who hasn’t yet taken on their role feel like they don’t need to put maximum effort into it anymore.

And I was happy with myself that when the group needed some people writing and editing an email that was meant to be sent to our service partners I volunteered and put up a couple of my friends to do it with me and we were able to get it done together.