Activities over the weekend

One more weekend before Hari Raya. By this coming weekend, I’ll be busy with own family matters at home, and so I’ll be taking time off from my voluntary work. I’d probably still get all those text messages from clients to wish me Selamat Hari Raya, but that’s about all involving my clients, I think…

So this past weekend I spent time doing matters related to my voluntary work.

On Saturday I went to visit Zainab at her new rented home. I had wanted to visit earlier during one of the weekdays, but Zainab had to work and I didn’t want to visit with just her hubby, Zaki, at home. When she told me Saturday was her off-day (she works on shift), I decided to visit the family on Saturday morning, after my pasar tani routine. After given the address by Zainab, I set the address in my GPS – although Zainab stays in Ipoh, the place she stays is not too familiar to me.

It wasn’t too much of a problem finding her house with the help of my GPS. Just as I was looking out for the house number, I saw Zaki about to come out of the house. Zaki went back in to wake Zainab up. You see, Zainab was on night shift the day before and so she slept in the morning, thinking I wouldn’t be there too early.

The house they’re staying now seems more comfortable then the previous house. However, they are sharing the house with another couple. The other couple found the rental of RM250 per month a bit too high for them and so they offered Zainab and Zaki to share the rent with them. The house has 3 rooms.

Zaki however, is still not working. He can give 1001 reasons why he had to quit almost every job he landed up with. Now he plans to stay at his mother’s house in another town as nobody is staying there now after his mother passed away 2 weeks ago. Zainab, however, cannot move together with her husband as that would mean quitting her job. What will the family survive on?

Not sure yet how the plan will work, or if the children will be following their father. We’ll just have to wait and see…

On Sunday, I had to attend the following function…

Yep, Buddies of Ipoh was again chosen as one of the recipients of funds granted by Yayasan Sultan Azlan Shah. The last one given was 2 years ago. At that time over 70 organisations were chosen to receive RM20K each. This time there were only 65 organisations receiving funds of the same amount. The Pemangku Raja himself presented the cheques to representatives of the organisations and so we had to be there an hour early for the briefing and rehearsal.

They ended up just explaining what to do and say, but only rehearsed for the first 2 rows of recipients. I was somewhere at the back row, and so the emcee didn’t get to announce The Buddies Society of Ipoh during the rehearsal. Knowing the high possibility of the emcees announcing our name as Buddhist instead of Buddies, I got up and approached the 2 emcees.

“Saya nak pastikan sebutan betul ya. Orang suka sebut Buddhist, padahalnya Buddies. Kang sebut Buddhist terkejut pulak orang tengok saya yang mengadap,” I said. The guy then responded, “Ha’ah ek, nanti apa pulak orang ingat.”

So yeah, this time they announced the name correctly… and I went home a happy mak aji with a RM20K cheque for my NGO.