Swetha

Pre-SULAM

1. My community partner site is actually my former college I stayed in. I am aware about how bad the termite’s infestation are in the rooms. The furniture such as the working chair can be frail and shaky as it has been eaten by the termites. The bed structures too usually will have holes that is filled with dust. 
2. My personal perception is Management of Allamanda will be a great community partner to work with as the staffs are very kind and professional. I also expect them to demand for the kind of help they would be needing which is very helpful to curb the issue.
3. The problem that we wanted to work with which were Termite problems in College Allamanda were suggested by Jahmain Jave as the service learning should be conducted in Sarawak. All the team members also have the same experience living in Allamanda. We all are aware of the situation hence why we chose this topic.
4. The only fear I have about working in the community is that we would not be able to achieve the management’s expectations. Since everything is held online, everyone’s effort to make this come together is very much needed. 

During-SULAM

1. The experience made me realise that it is important to offer help and share knowledge with others. The residents of Allamanda might have made reports to the management throughout the years. It is important to understand that this issue requires a long-time care and budget as well. Our roles are to provide temporary solutions for the students and management itself.
2. The skills that I get to sharpen is my communication skills. By having to prepare the service learning by online is not only challenging but also crucial to have use the right words to convey the context. The knowledge that I acquired through this experience is how to write proposal to host a programme, and skills to create posters and infographics. 
3. This experience helped me to better understand about how important insects is but can also turn deadly, in other words pest. Termites play an important role in decomposing matters like wood but they are living in households causes human conflicts making them a pest. Moreover, it costs a lot of money and time to treat the infestations. Lastly, I learned that pest such as bed bugs may cause stress in mental illness patients causing them to attempt suicide.
4. I would like to comment about being compassionate and responsible. I realised that being understanding with my teammates are very important especially in this hard time since everyone is struggling and trying their level best to contribute. I would not lose anything by helping my friends to settle their parts as one day they might help me in return. Responsible is another trait I developed. Reminding the deadlines and constantly asking questions in the group chat whenever I do not understand the given task so I would not make a huge mistake. This is also important to ensure everyone gives their best.
5. I will use the techniques about preventing termite’s infestation in the future if I ever happen to come across a termite nest. I will be interested in teaching my juniors in allamanda on how to treat the termite problems because I was once very clueless on how to handle them and the non-stop dust.
6. My long-term goals are to open a foundation to do charity works. I very well hope I would be able to do so I can help poorer family that lives in the inner parts of the countries. Houses with no proper ventilation and even made from woods can be facing this problem and having a hard time to get over with.

Post-SULAM

1. I learned that the management are very warming to work with. They did give suggestions on improving the programme more and I found them very professional just like how I expected them to be. The community were supportive and helped by answering the given forms. 
2. The strength of the project was that allamanda management have been anticipating for a programme like this regarding termites. We felt very much welcomed working with them, but the only weakness is that it had to be handled online. The impacts this programme could have been harder if it were carried out physically.
3. The challenges that we faced were to get the messages across to more people online. It is important that many people answer the questionnaires (Google form) that were created to understand the situation even more. Another challenge is to gain more engagements on social media platform such as our Instagram page. I wish there is more student friendly platform where everyone shares projects and help each other.
4. Our groups anticipated collecting more feedbacks from allamanda residents on the Google form. We are still thankful for the received feedbacks, but we expected a larger number of people would be answering because we promoted on our Instagram and WhatsApp platforms. In future I suggest that we made it compulsory for the course mates to answer their peers Google form if they fit the criteria.
5. The target for this is to create more awareness. Safe to say, we indeed achieved on creating more awareness on how to handle termites because the feedbacks we have gotten they did say they learned something new. We have also created poster for college allamanda so that they can spread among the new residents in the future.
6. The most important lesson I learned from the service learning is that it is important to have a strategized work plan. This involves having a clearer view on what the team has planned on achieving. It does not matter whether the achievements are big or small, quality is important. Everyone’s contribution in the team matters.
7. Leadership skills are very important in conducting service learning. Leadership motivates the people to a higher level of performance through their strong human relations. It is an important function of management which helps to maximize efficiency and to achieve organizational goals, so managers must have traits of a leader.
8. I am 100% positive that some approaches would be conducted differently and hopefully we have recovered from Covid-19 pandemic which is the main obstacle during this first go. The awareness that could be created when held in UNIMAS will reach a larger amount of people. The are also activities that could be conducted and surely this is the potential ways. A talk on termites’ awareness and how to treat it in College Allamanda would have been very useful especially when its done at the start of the semester along with the new intake’s orientation slots.