Living out the words of Rocky Balboa..

PJ half marathon was on Sunday. It was pretty cool. I hadn't ran any runs in a long time so it was a nice feeling to be back on the road. The turnout for the half marathon wasn't extremely insipiring and although the papers reported it to have a turnout of 4500 people, I felt it was much less. Interestingly, my brother and I agreed that there must've been a mistake in the measurement of the route as we felt that the route was shorter than stated. However, the run as a whole was pretty ok I guess.

-

The Chin children performing their traditional dance

The Chin refugee school had their sports day on Saturday. It was held in Kajang stadium and was the initiative of Malaysian Care with the support of UNHCR and other churches namely FGA and SIB. 3 different schools came together and were divided into 4 different colour groups and competed against each other(competing by schools would be not practical as some schools had less people as compared to others). It started off with some speeches, then came the traditional dance and then only the events started. The events contested were the duck walk race and running with a ping pong ball in a spoon for the pre schoolers. The elder children participated in the 100m, 200m, 400m, softball and football.

Pre-schoolers with ping pong ball in spoon

200m girls

Michael, Tee Keat and I were manning a games stall which was quite fun initially. But we soon realised that the kids weren't the type that gave up easily. They'd just keep on coming back for more and more and more. It was almost as if they lived out the words of Rocky Balboa "Its not how hard you can hit, or how much you can hit, but how hard you can get hit and yet move in the right direction". They were so persistant on coming back for more that it got quite tiring towards the end. But everything was made worth it when we ate satay kajang at the end of the sports day.

It was worth all the effort =D

-

One of the Chin refugee children and her family will be leaving for the US of A tomorrow. Its a weird feeling- knowing that they'll be headed towards a better life where their status as refugees will be acknowledged but at the same time, feeling worried about how they're gonna fit into the more sophisticated society there. It brings me to wonder if I had done any good trying to educate them in the past weeks. Could I have done more? I can only hope and pray that they'll be fine over there.