You Can’t Help Them All

I have some sad news today.

For those that have read my previous blogpost, I Saw You in the Newspaper! , there has been some development in the case of RumahAmpik. To recap, in my previous post I mentioned that our Corporate Communications office was contacted by a man called Mr. William concerning including his children into our After School Project (ASP). 

Today, after a meeting with one of our board of directors, it was decided that RumahAmpik, at this time, is not a feasible community to foster due to the need for trained mentors with more experiences in dealing with problematic children as well as the fact that we have three other communities in our care.

I had suspected for a while that this would be the outcome of the case, but it does not change the sadness in my heart. Perhaps when the ASP is more established, and the mentors more well trained or rather if ASP has the ability to train the mentors that are already dedicated to the project, we can attempt such a thing with RumahAmpik. Till then, RumahAmpik has to stand and face this alone.

This situation, however, has taught me a little something in balancing the good of the company with the good of the community. CSR is never the priority of an organization, it is simply an obligation they have to cater to in order to continue their businesses as they please. In our case, the ASP has never been a priority in time or funding from our organization. I understand that in this specific case, ASP was truly unequipped to handle more problematic children under its care, and had to cede the opportunity to a later date, if at all.

I maintain, however, that in fulfilling an organizations corporate social responsibility the end goal of doing ‘just enough’ just isn’t enough. One day, people will look back and realize a company has done the bare minimum for their community and then they will demand compensation. One day, that organization they will be forced to realize that while they can’t help them all, they can certainly try.

I Saw You in the Newspaper!

Good old traditional media!

Yesterday we were contacted by a man called William, to inform us that he had been observing the progress of the After School Project over the local newspapers and he wanted us to take the children of his longhouse (RumahAmpik) into our program!

The After School Project is an educational program where we ‘foster’ groups of children from the community and carry out various educational activities with them, to teach them that learning can be a fun and rewarding experience. We currently have three groups of children under our charge, which are the Kompleks Hamidah Yakub orphanage, Rumah Anak Amal Kesayangan Kami orphanage and the children of the nearby community in Kampung Wireless.

We were invited today Mr. William’s longhouse to meet with the village chief and his assistant and during our meeting they told us of the high dropout rate of their village, as well as the high marriage rate, especially of those under 18-years-old. These marriages were usually due to unplanned teen pregnancy and are legal in Malaysia, as the parents of the under-aged individuals gave their consent. Something Mr. William said really shocked me and made me realise that the After School Project and the education it brings really is important.

“Parents protect our children, saying ‘don’t scare them, let them be!’ but when they get older, they get wilder. They say ‘help them, but don’t scare them, let them be!’ and later when they’re young adults, they are set in their ways and cannot be changed. They are poor and will always be poor because they are uneducated, all they can do is mix cement and sit in guardhouses. They are poor, so they drink, which makes them more poor; this makes them sadder, so they drink some more. Their parents say ‘help them!’

How? It’s too late.”

Traditional media has a way of reaching the local communities that the internet can’t, not just because they might now have internet connections where they are but because there is something about an article in the newspaper that says something about an organisation’s reliability. Aside from that, it doesn’t take any effort or commitment to comment on a post on Facebook, but it takes a certain amount of conviction and investment in a situation to call a phone number on a newspaper article, talk to a receptionist and wait to be transferred before asking for help from a complete stranger.

Hopefully, after meeting with him and discussing the situation with him, we can help him and his people in the future.