Service Learning Day Reflection

Saturday, 19th may, was an eventful day for all of the people in class 1E6. We had to put up decorations in the CD shelter to make it look like what we have planned it to: a haunted house. Although I arrived late, there was still plenty much to complete. The boards were not up yet, the props needed were not placed at their positions yet… In fact, only the walls were finished. Once I had arrived, I had to help JinPing and HuiHien with the preparation of masking tapes for everyone who needed them. We had to go around with the tapes on our arms and let everyone took what they one. It was a painful experience for me especially as I was the one whose hair was getting ripped off. When they removed the tapes from my arm, they had to do it with such force that most of my hairs were gone. Once most of the garbage bags were put up, I had to go around to see if there were any need of touching ups. I managed to patch up some of the gaps with tape and once I finished my job, I had to go around collecting rubbish. JinPing was kind enough to help me in the end and with nothing to do left; I went to help YaXin with taping of the garbage bags for the boards. A test trial was conducted and being one of the ghosts, I had to get into my position and scare the people passing by. Of course they were not really scared when they saw my partner jump out of the expected position but they did not expect my sudden appearance from somewhere else and because of that, I really scared the wits of some of the testers, HuiHien and JiaYi especially. Overall, the day had been quite fun and I really did regret for not coming earlier.

On the actual day itself, which was Service Learning Day, I had to get into my position as the second opera ghost. Throughout the day, I changed my position many times. After a trip from the first few customers, I realized that my part was not really successful so instead of scaring them by jumping out suddenly, I decided to sit on one the chairs and wave at them as they pass by. Unfortunately, some of the customers were really enthusiastic, to the point of being over-enthusiastic as some of them actually tried to slap my hand, hold my hand or even trying to do a high-five. Since most of them were girls, I am not really complaining… Yuan Xuan was not as me as when it was his turn to be out there, one of the customers tried to wrench off the mask from his face. I also had to endure some blows on my mask and it really hurts to have your face smacked like that, even with the mask on. In fact, it actually adds to the pain with the mask on. A group of customers, three sec3 girls, were really clever enough to bring their digital cameras, taking photos of practically everything. I also had to pose a shot for them. Luckily I had my mask on so my identity was not disclosed. It was a class effort and when we counted out our earnings, I was really surprised that we managed to earn that much. It was $300+/- which meant that about 300 students came to our booth, one fifth of the school population in fact. It had been a really big success.

From this whole thing, from the preparations to the actual day, I learnt one thing which many people know but had failed to grasp and that is team spirit. If it had been only one person doing all the boarding up, it would have taken him at least one day and if he had hired some other people who he did not even know well to appear on that day, the hired people may not co-operate and the customers will fail to grasp the spookiness of the haunted house. The earnings we got were well deserved, seeing that we had worked together well to build up the whole place and playing our parts well. Although we have team spirit, it was not enough to last us the whole day. Some of us were worn out from their roles and were turning spiteful, occasionally saying curt to their friends if they did something wrong. Part of it was actually caused by our customers actually. We did emphasize that nothing could be touched but our customers could not resist hitting some of us, causing pain which added to our worries. The only thing I learnt about myself so far was that I could actually cut and paste. I never knew that I could do a little of art and craft…

Hung Bing Shen