Learning to serve others

True to its promise, Midnight Football, which is AFC’s project aimed at guiding troubled youth using the social power of football, has begun its social development and awareness phase of the eight month-programme lasting until April this year.

During the day-outing, the GPA staff taught the 21 Kuala Lumpur and Selangor youngsters to be sensitive to the needs of the community and its citizens, to think about others over self and to give service.

The programme’s eye opener was a video presentation entitled “Ryan’s Well”, which was about a six-year-old Canadian boy who managed to secure funds and donations to build a well to help people in Uganda have clean water to drink.

The lessons learned from the video were better etched in their minds when the football-loving participants went into a session to discuss and present on what prompted Ryan to live for the sake of others, the obstacles he faced and how he overcame them in his self-hatched meaningful mission.

Trust is an important element in interdependent living and to inculcate this character trait, the kids had some games so that they could become more trustworthy and trusting in the quest to live for others.

This was then followed by a sharing session on group dynamics and character building by GPA Officer James Poon and team building session by volunteers from the Raudah Camp, the latter involving the youth jumping into an icy cool pool to learn to overcome fear.

After enough theories, it was then time to walk the talk.

The finale was a community service activity whereby the participants, bare-chested and still dripping from the soak in the icy cool pool, cleaned up a riverbank nearby.

Out of the three teams, Team Perigi (Well) emerged the best team whose members were Aznam Ghazali, Shafarizal Abdullah, Adzhar Yahaya, Ezry Suparman, Akmal Zaki, Mustaqim Samsudin and Sangar Muniandy.

Ezry Suparman and Amirullah Zaki were the best participants.