Not knowing much of the people in the service in the beginning, I feel like I had been a bit awkward with everyone, which means that I wasn’t as expressive and engaging as I am right now. In the first few service sessions, to prepare for our interactions with the clients, we did some research on Intellectual Difficulties, the Olympics they will be participating in, and their facilities. Even though our research was not very detailed and thorough, I think the preparation has definitely helped us perform better at the center, especially given the visit by Joshua for briefing of the insights of the service. As a Vice-Chair, to comply with the center’s aim to improve the health and well-being of persons with intellectual difficulties, I led our group in planning of potential training drills that we could incorporate when teaching the essential skills to the members. This was exceptionally important because of the social stigma behind persons with any form of disabilities in Singapore. Therefore, it was important for the center and us to come up with engaging yet simple drills to improve their social and physical health, thus allowing them to easily engage in the Singaporean community.

Most of the sessions so far focused on floor ball. We mainly focused on improving the clients’ skills by instructing them with various activities regarding passing, dribbling, and shooting skills in floor ball. For more effective communication and productivity, we were all paired up and solely focused on improving one client’s skill. During the time where my partner and I had to instruct our client to perform the drills prepared by the AMK minds, I was in fact surprised by how much our client has improved over the course of 1/2 months of service. Additionally, incorporation of language (verbal and body) has allowed me to more effectively communicate with the client, and the intimacy my client and I developed not only helped the client’s skills improve, but also enhanced the atmosphere as it created a more friendly, comfortable environment for both the students and clients. On the contrary, I did experience some challenges as it was my first time working with people with ID. One of the greatest challenge I experienced was the lack of communication between the clients and I as not only did I not fluently speak chinese, but also the lack of confidence of the clients. However, I was able to overcome this challenge by understanding the nature of ID as they tend to lack skills in communication. This has helped me become more patient when talking to or instructing them, and also by becoming well versed in body language, I was able to more effective communicate with them. With this experience, I learned to be patient, but at the same time realized the need to constantly serve the community I live in by engaging in activities such as these.