Tabitha is a non-profit organization based in Cambodia, and I decided to apply for it as my GC activity. I initially heard of Tabitha in our school’s service fair earlier in the year and felt that the mission & aim of the organization aligned with the kinds of goals I wanted to support and contribute to. So far, we have done our fundamental research into the organization as a whole, decided on some objectives we wanted to achieve throughout this year, and began planning for our Project Week to Cambodia.
Other than thinking and planning for Project Week, we all contributed to establishing our service goal settings, which would be a structure to follow throughout the year and work as a guide for our group (see link here). This included defining our goals, what action to take depending on our objectives, and finding success indicators. I found that ‘taking action’ was not limited to our physical work in Cambodia, it also included indirect action and advocacy. Many of these were linked to the Tabitha team in the Dover Campus, who had more experience with the organization than our campus. Personally, I had worked with a service group before in my previous school, but remember it to be largely based on physical interaction working with the people locally. When finding out that the chance to actually see and work in Cambodia was at the end of this academic year, I remember wondering what our group was going to do for the rest of the time in Singapore. However, having experienced the tasks we do weekly for more than a month, I have realized that there is so much preparation to be done before heading to Cambodia in May, ranging from organizing the trip there, to investigating more effective ways we could help in our time there. Our group still needs to create a solid plan and distribute roles to everyone so that all of us can contribute to the planning of Project Week, but I feel that we have already accomplished so much in the time that we have had so far.
Lastly, I feel that what I have been able to learn from this past month most aligns with LO1: Awareness. Although I did have the previous experience of working with an external service group, I had never even heard of Tabitha before being introduced to this GC, so there was still a lot that I had to learn along the way. Overall, I feel that all the members of our Tabitha group have been very involved and committed to our tasks each week, and I feel that I was also able to further understand the premise of our long-term and short-term goals. However, I would like to improve by becoming further involved and committed to the planning of our Project Week. Project Week was a very new concept for me, as I had never had to facilitate a service plan outside of the set curriculum before. Now that I have a better understanding of what it is, and what students should achieve within that time, I would like to further be involved in the efforts of our group to make our trip to Cambodia the most successful it can be.