I'm currently sitting around at my man's lab.. he's at the first floor doing some welding, and here i am rotting. Well, not exactly rotting, because actually I have tons to do. I've got 30-page-thick of Novak's Gynecology to read (something about endometrial hyperplasia); but I've got no mood to do...
My mind's wandering somewhere else. To yesterday's chain of events, to be exact.
So we did this students-give-back thing at a very poor village in Jatinangor: cilayung. I happened to be stationed at citeureup, the more distant part of the village, where the people were poorer, the buildings were shabbier, and the conditions could make the hardest of heart melt away.
The event that we organized for Citeureup comprised of a "Balai Pengobatan" (House of Remedy...?) and Home Visit. Balai Pengobatan is where the villagers come, be examined by students of health care (medicine, dentistry, nursing, and pharmacy students), be diagnosed for any pathological state by the doctors, and be given some medicines to relief their sickness. Home visit, on the other hand, was a more proactive approach where students come to the villagers' home instead, to examine the health state of the villagers as well as to give a certain level of understanding of basic health care. Balai Pengobatan was actually an excellent chance to practise what little skills we have acquired so far in history-taking. I stationed there, but failed to gain adequate exercise for it :( mainly because i was needed to do something else. It's okay, though; I'm quite confident I can make up for whatever I missed out yesterday later in my co-ass period.
What's been bugging my mind, though, is the fact that whatever we did in the village yesterday will stop just there. The people would remain as poor as ever; their health would not be improved, their homes would still be as shabby; and when the next batch of students are doing their giving-back activities sometime in the future, everything will still be the same.
THAT'S UNBELIEVABLY SAD TO THE POINT OF NEARLY UNREASONABLE.
The organizing committee had worked like hell for the past two weeks, but what are the impacts we made on the villager's lives? Short-lived (probably one-week-worth) of pain relief, and that's it. We have changed nothing despite our hard work... we manage to put a little bit of smile in their faces for a day, and then we pretend as if it is enough; but I know that deep in our heart, we realize it isn't enough. It is almost useless.
It is giving hungry people fishes and not teaching them how to fish.
And then I compare our giving-back projects with my man's faculty's (Mech Engineering-ITB, which built a bridge for a remote village in Soreang) and my sis's faculty (Architecture-ITB, which built a playground for elementary school kids' studying home in a kampong near ITB), and I see juxtapositions. Their projects are much more complicated, require a hell lot of time and commitment, and the impacts of their projects are long-lasting.
The whole night I was thinking about what are the possible things that we could have done as a follow-up step; but everything I could think of require massive funding, a lot of energy from whoever will voluntarily organizing it, and a lot of commitment from everyone involved.
As students, though, we're obliged to our academic activities that sometimes it is difficult to always remember our obligations to the community.
I wish there's enough of us who could remember how important it is to think beyond ourselves, because that's the only way for us to move forward, to be a step (or even many steps) beyond what we think we're capable of, and to be an asset for others.
But then again, now that PKM is over, I'm glad for the chance to focusing on my academic affairs (exams in two weeks!). Mixed feeling, eh? :p