Several busy weeks have passed and soon the mid year holidays will be over. As a group, our group has achieved certain goals but I believe we have the commitment and responsibility to strive for greater heights. On 9^th May, the five of us went down to Nan Hua Primary school to begin our first step towards setting up a self collection centre, starting a food drive. We had hoped to receive a great amount of support from these primary school students and inculcate in them the values of sharing and contributing back to the society. Just a day before, we tried our best to do some last rehearsals before this day, hoping to put on a good show and get our important message across. Early in the morning, we reached Nan Hua Primary School feeling very excited about presenting our project to such a big number of people.

Personally, I felt that the idea of using a skit to bring across our messages was a brilliant one as normal presentations may not be as appealing to the Primary school students. Therefore, we made use of an interesting power point slide with full of pictures to allow the primary schools students to have a very good understanding of our skit. I have to admit that our actors were marvelous in the way they interacted with the Primary schools students and I was also glad that the students were very enthusiastic about our initiative. I could see that when we displayed pictures of the beneficiaries of Food from the Heart, it did touched most of the students and even the teachers’ hearts.

After the interactive presentation, we went back to school to continue with our lessons. Although how successful we were at conveying our messages would largely determine on the amount of food items that we collect over the next three days, our team sincerely believes that we did make an impact and we were hopeful that the response would be overwhelming.

Following that week, the collection started at Nan Hua Primary school from Monday to Wednesday. On Monday, the team went down to take a look at the collection status in the school. Indeed we were impressed by the response given by the students there. With just only a period of 2 days, they are able to respond quickly and give generously. I noticed that some of the items we had collected even came in boxes. I was very pleased that the students were so supportive of our project. On Wednesday, it was the last day of collection for the food drive at Nan Hua. The group headed down to the school and was ready to be greeted by an alarming lot of food items. We had intended to sort and pack the food items when we get there. However, we did our best to sort and pack to our very best. I have to agree that we were inexperienced at sorting and packing of food items and we took quite a long time to separate the food items into different categories. We had to split the variety of food items in accordance to their weight and type of food.

After about 3 hours of packing and sorting, the amount of food items did not seem to be lesser. We were wondering that with our slow progress, how we would be able to complete the whole process in just less than one hour. Only then did I realize that such a job is not an easy feat. We packed all we could and asked our external mentor, Mr Eon Eng for help. We were grateful that he was very understanding and offered to help us pack it when he transports all the food items back to the Food from the Heart warehouse. We really appreciate what he did for us.

After that, we left the place to head back home. After going through just one food drive, we really learned a lot with regards to the amount of effort one has to contribute to conduct a successful food drive. With our experience, I am confident that future food drives will achieve greater success.