Live. Laugh. Love

YC Camp 1 and 2 was totally awesome. I'm really glad I got to spend 8 incredible days at Peacehaven! Here are the pics :)

The 4 Awesome people who helped me out with the Newcomers' Booth
for YC Camp 1.
Top Row: Raechan, Me, Gloria Bottom Row: Evyonne and Shern I.

Amanda, Sharon, Me and Yuen Wei (my quirky and pretty distant relative)

Jolene, Me, Sharon and Amanda

I took photos with an Angel! (Ok, that sounds a little lame ><")

Ms. Serena and the 3 Musketeers.


4 Feet and the log.
I really like this photo. Guess which foot is mine!





Prickyla and I :) (she reminds me of a tiny, tiny bit of Alvin and the

Chipmunks ^^" - Prisc, please don't kill me for this)



Roxanne.

The Rose among the Thorns.

Starting from the top row, left to right: Joelle, Prisc and Bernard.
Bottom row: Me, Rose and Sharon.

Esther, my roommate of 4 days. She looks super sweet in this pic!

PJ 2, CG Photo. The 'proper' one. lol.

Top row: Jolene, Amanda, Christian, Bernard and Patrick.

Bottom row: Me, Karyn, Stacey and Cheryl.

PJ 2, CG Photo. The 'poser' one.

We're all posers ^^.

PJ 2, CG Photo. The 'finger-pointing' one.

Find the person who is pointing at herself :P.

I absolutely love grayscaled photos.

So pretty!

Cheryl, Me and Jolene.

Ali's son and I.

Jack and I.

This photo turned out way too dark ><.

It's supposed to be Johan and I but ... it probably doen't look like I'm in the pic.

Photo failure #1.

Racheal and I

Patrick and I.

Ariel and I.

She reminds me so much of The Little Mermaid!

Sin Ying and I.

She can blow baloons into baloons!

This is what happens to those who disobey camp rules.

Locked up with the visiting hours displayed on the top right hand corner of the photo.

The offenders will not be named ^^. lol.

I promised them not to upload the pic on facebook...

blogged it instead :).

Fresh Air.

Shern Ai, Allison, Raechan and I.

Junk Food Stash brought by Rose and some by me.

Cookies, Coffee, Chips, Instant soup, etc - you name it,

we probably have it.
Pic is taken just as camp started. lol. Most of the food was gone after 8 days!

Same Food, Different Location. ><.

Fiona and I.

After 8 days without being able to drive out whenever I wanted to and with the lack of sleep - I was and am glad to be back in the city of Kuala Lumpur.

Till next year, peeps!

Check This Out!

I found this on Chin Wah's blog and thought it was really cool! :) Try it out and see what your results are...

I'm back from Peacehaven and I'm as happy as can be - Merry Christmas, everybody!

Christmas...

It's been 2 crazily hectic weeks for me, till now - and tomorrow, I will leave for a church camp at Genting for 8 days. This means that I will be posting my next post earliest by next Sunday if not later :). I am quite eager to just getaway from the city and the hectic lifestyle of KL residents. To take a deep breath and just relax...it's been such a long time since I went on a trip - too long, in my opinion.

The past 2 weeks have been spent tutoring the girl I spoke about in my 2 previous posts as well as going to and from church and cramming my Christmas shopping into 2 days. I didn't get much shopping done though - barely managed to buy a gift for each of my family members (i.e. mom, dad, brothers etc) and here I am, leaving till Christmas Eve! I hope the 24th of Dec will not be too crazy a time to do last minute shopping. I can only cross my fingers!

I visited a community centre during these two weeks and my mind still reels from just knowing how truly blessed I am. These children, who are so close to my home (geographically), have such different demographics than I do...even as Christmas is approaching so soon, I can't help feeling that I just have not helped enough.

It's so easy to complain, to speak of injustice and just whine sometimes that I forget about those who are happy just to be able to buy textbooks and go to school...and those who don't even make it to college not because they aren't smart or hardworking enough, but because of the environment and family condition they live in. This is when I feel it really is unfair - unfair that they pull through circumstances that come their way - happily and not acting like a child about the whole thing. They do it because they don't have a choice which sometimes makes me question if choice itself is a blessing or a curse.

Love. That's what Christmas means to me.

Mother Teresa says it in one sentence when she stated, "We can do no great things, only small things with great love" and also, "Intense love does not measure, it just gives.”

I find it a struggle sometimes to just give the best part of me to someone who does not want it or even care - but that's love, isn't it? When the only thing that matters is to give. I look up to Mother Teresa so much - she's not perfect, far from it, but she loved - with all 50 years of her life in India. That's beauty, that's what love is.

I sometimes find it so hard to tie together the idea of romantic love to simply loving because, to me, the difference should not be that extreme. If love is about giving, why do some guys choose to simply take from their girlfriends or vise versa? Why crush one another when love should build a person up and not tear him or her down? Why choose to be selfish and to just get what you want and leave scars, and cuts, and bruises that will always be on the person you once proclaimed undying love for?...and if so...why say it's love anyway? Why lie about an emotion that is so profound?

There are times I feel that the word 'Love' - a feeling so intense, pure, and almost sacred - has become tainted and overused to a point that it has come to mean too little to so many people. To me:

Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.
Love doesn't strut,
Doesn't have a swelled head,
Doesn't force itself on others,
Isn't always "me first,"
Doesn't fly off the handle,
Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn't revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end. Love never dies. (Taken from1 Corinthians 13:4-8, The Message)

You don't have to agree with me but this is what I think is the perfect definition of love. The sentence that struck me the most is that Love 'always looks for the best' - and I see that in my parents - towards each other and towards my two brothers and me. They never fail to be our biggest 'cheerleaders' in the sense that they cheer us on - when we sometimes just lose the strength to get going :).

Love doesn't limit itself to an individual - but extends to all that the person holds dear - anyone and anything. It's hard work but at the end of the day, the wrinkles on the face of my parents are because of working so hard to make my life to be easier. It's in the moments that I'm most unaware of (like a late night chat with my mom or dad) that I realize and am reminded that I have hardly ever seen anyone more beautiful than them.

ELL Students (Part 2)

Ok, this isn't a post..mostly just a questions:

If you're writing an English composition, is it safer to write it in the past tense or present tense?

=)
I told my student past tense, am I wrong?

ELL Students

I’ve grown up in a mostly English speaking home, alternating from English to Cantonese depending on who I was talking to (my grandmother, who is Hakka, is unable to communicate in English).

It’s so easy for me to take these things for granted – the English language, that is. I’ve had little problems reading, writing, understanding and basically just using the language. Today, at my very first tutoring session with an ESL (English as a Second Language) student, I guess I finally realized that, it really is difficult for certain students to even put together a sentence in English, much less a paragraph or an essay.

I’ve never tutored English before, till now, and my student is hardworking and really eager to learn – I’m totally lying to say that I’m not scared. I asked her to write me 2 essays the previous week and upon reading them today, (there were certain spaces in her essays which she filled with Chinese characters – she didn’t know how to translate her thoughts into written English), I realized that I had taken on a challenge bigger than I had initially given it credit for.

I conducted the entire lesson in Cantonese, mostly not wanting to pressure her into speaking in English at the moment. Her vocabulary is very limited but she could speak english - Manglish, mostly.

I am excited, to teach her, to improve, and learn along with her – but among those positive and optimistic thoughts, buried within are certain worries, fears and anxiousness that I wouldn’t be able to teach her everything I want to. I want her to be able to master the language, am I being too optimistic? Too naive?

I looked through about a dozen websites at 3am this morning, seeking advice on how to teach ESL students and some of the great websites I found are listed below: (you can look if you’re interested for any reason at all)

For more advanced ESL Students:
http://www.rong-chang.com/
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/tutor/problems/esl.shtml

For beginner ESL Students:
http://www.bnkst.edu/literacyguide/ell.html

I passed her a Sweet Valley book, a rather simple (and non-threatening) one where they’re still in middle school. I guess, to me, reading is a must if a person wants to improve their written and spoken English.

I have so many thoughts swimming in my head at the moment – I really appreciate any feedback at all on how to improve or make my one- on-one tutoring lessons more effective.

The First Post

I checked out a few blogs just to check out how I should go about this... post a first post, that is, and decided on '10 things about me that you might not know':

1. I sleep with my lights on (because I'm uncomfortable with sleeping in the dark - I force myself to sleep in the dark during sleepovers so that people don't know I'm afraid of the dark - lol).
2. I don't really know how to go about moving a level up from being acquaintances to becoming friends ( I usually end up leaving it to 'other person' to take more initiative cause I'm lacking in this department, it feels awkward for me).
3. I'm terrified of bugs. (Since I don't have any pets), nothing, besides from me, should be living (or alive) in my room (this usually includes anything with more than 2 legs - including lizzards).
4. I would sleep outside on my living room couch if I was really freaked out by any creepy crawlies in my room (sad, but true).
5. I like to constantly tell my family (including my 2 brothers, my sis-in-law, my parents and my grandma) that I love them :)
6. I like the rain. It's so calming - unless I have to run in it!
7. I haven't gotten around to watching T.V for the past 3 years (I can't help it! I stopped Astro in form 5 and never got around to getting hooked on it ever again...so most probably, if you're talking about Desperate Housewives or Prison Break and I just smile - I have no idea what you're talking about).
8. I love watching movies (I have an entire collection of chick flicks). I guess this makes up of my lack of T.V. exposure.
9. I'm terrible with directions. I just cannot fathom how some people (like my mom), can have the entire map of KL in their mind.
10. This is the first post I've written in my life (of 20 years). I have been deprived :)