Saturday

With about an hour left until the election results are fully out, I figured that now's the time to do some updating..

On thursday, I woke up super-early to attend my second class on driving theory at Damansara. My instructor picked me up and he drove pretty fast that day. Just when we were roughly 100 meters away from the driving school, he suddenly realised that the brakes weren't really working. Now I don't know about you guys but I think malfunctioning brakes ought to warrant some degree of panicking..we weren't going very fast thankfully but it wasn't long before even the acceleration pedal seemed to have joined the brakes. *floors the pedal, engine vrooms but car can't move* When we got down to see what was wrong, the left wheel in the front was kinda popped aside, which explained why the car suddenly stopped moving. My morning exercise that day was car-pushing and it was excruciatingly difficult because of the mis-aligned wheel. But the interesting bit was that the car broke down right after we came out of the busy highway into the smaller roads around the housing area with much fewer cars, which meant that we were really really lucky. I take it that it was a blessing, because to have a car break down in the middle of a highway would've been suicide. So yeah, thank you LORD!

Even more surprising was who turned up there also. I was expecting a very boring day (3 hours lecture + 3 hours practical lessons) but when a white van loaded with other students pulled over in front of me, I could immediately recognise the two familiar faces in it:

Don't ask me why they came together xD

Well, at least we had the chance to do a little catching up over a cup of tea at the mamak there. Rachel's doing Mechatronics (to my surprise) at UTAR I think, while Jon's gonna move to Nottingham and pursue Finance. Kinda wish I could tell them where I was planning to go but alas, I could only come up with a vague answer about considering Environmental Science..

You can clearly see that the three hours of 'car talk' had taken its toll on us..

But moving on to the next day, I took up Simon's offer for real this time (I was genuinely interested the last time, Simon :D) to take a trip all the way to the ends of the earth to help out for an afternoon in SPICES. In case you don't already know what it's all about, just check out the quote from Simon Sim below:

"No, it's not a restaurant as I initially thought. It's a centre run by some really great, commited people of Emmanuel EFC, down in the heart of Wangsa Maju, I do believe it stands for Support Parents, Infants and Children through Early Services (right, Sue Ann?). It's a centre that teaches children with learning disabilities, like autism and Down syndrome. It sort of helps these kids with all sorts of basic skills, like reading, writing, coordination and morals. Something truly very admirable."

And in case you don't know what autism really means too, here's a quote from Wikipedia:

"Autism is a brain development disorder that impairs social interaction and communication, and causes restricted and repetitive behavior, all starting before a child is three years old."

I went over to Simon's house at 10.45 and we left at about 11.30 from the KTM in Subang.

We took a train to Sentral, and then hopped to LRT and stopped at Wangsa Maju, and clutching a map that Ann Sue gave us we walked for some distance.

Apparently Ann Sue's face was plastered outside as 'Dilarang benarkan pelajar ini masuk'. Hmm, wonder what she did here...haha.

SPICES is pretty well tinted (for privacy) and you could easily mistake it for an illegal arcade centre of some sort when they have the locks on outside..

Much to my chagrin, we DIDN'T get lost or anything, and even arrived half an hour earlier. So we bummed at a nearby mamak instead, which is really near Ann Sue's church like she always says.

If you had not had the chance to see autistic or Down Syndrome kids up close and interact with them before, you could forgiven for thinking that they either bite people's ears or poop and pee all over the place, not unlike old people who had gone senile. The media hardly shows these kids for who they really are, and I think they often wrongly paint a picture of suffering parents and dirty houses. But having spent the whole afternoon observing them (and occasionally helping out), I found them to be pretty much who and what they are: kids. Okay, so one of them was cock-eyed. One was hyperactive. One kept crying for no reason. One seemed to live in Dreamland and hummed all the time. Not 'normal' in most sense of the word, but they were kids just the same. It's not something that you can easily describe but I think if you were there that day with me and Simon you would definitely be amused by these chirpy kids and their funny antics.

Because autism can manifest in degrees and various forms of disorder, teaching them requires special one-on-one attention in most cases and this means that it is more difficult to teach three autistic children than it is teaching an entire class of blind or deaf or mute kids. Special schools like SPICES are quite rare, and few would do it for money. It's a labour of love for the most part, and it's sad that there's obviously not enough love going around, if what the supervisor at SPICES said were to be taken seriously: "We've got a long waiting list actually..."

While we didn't really do much there, we tried our best to learn whatever we could about dealing with autistic children from observing how the teachers taught the lessons. We didn't become teachers overnight but I believe the experience alone was worth the long journey there, which isn't really that long when you have someone to accompany you. Right, Simon?

On the way back we stopped at Sentral because Simon was busted from his hunger and we decided to grab something at Sentral's McD. Some pretty funny moments ensued (which I feel should just be left between ourselves) but in the end we managed to get our hands on Fish Fillets.

It's great that they had just only reduced the price to RM4.

After wolfing it down we got our buttocks back to Subang Jaya's KTM station and my dad picked us up. In his cab. And unfortunately for Simon my dad had to ferry four or five of his regular customers around before he could Simon back home. Simon ended up going straight to caregroup/cellgroup and had to forego his dinner. Sorry Sim! :(

Meanwhile, I treated myself to a nice supper to celebrate the wonderful day that went by:

What's better than wantan mee? Fried-wantan mee with kari ayam, that's what (^.^)

Thank you LORD for the journey mercies and the great fun that we had that day, and not to mention the chance to spend time with the kids at SPICES, who touched and blessed each of us in their unique ways.