Reflection 2

During this SULAM preparation, google meet and WhatsApp were used as our official platforms to meet and discuss every detail of our project. Four meetings were held during the SULAM preparation. The first meeting is about task allocation and some early discussion on essential aspects such as the targeted community. We did the second meeting to start drafting the proposal for our SULAM project. Some parts of the proposal still cannot be further discussed. After all, some communities that we chose were rejected by Dr Rafeah because the community should be from an external assembly with a leader like a school or a village. This was when Aidel proposed the urgent meeting to discuss our targeted community further. Since all the schools mentioned during our second meeting need to undergo a complicated procedure, Aidel directly went to his former high school (SAKURA) to meet his teacher, the advisor of Kelab Alam Sekitar, to ask for their permission and further procedures need to be done. There were some special requests from SAKURA which are one of us needs to be there on the day of the program, the program start at 8 am, and all paperwork should be done by the end of April. Our group agreed and proceeded with this school as our targeted community. Other than discussing the targeted community, our group leader gave an excellent idea for us to do composting at home for 30 days, starting from 1st April until 30th April. Besides, we planned on being active on Instagram by posting three posters every week. The fourth meeting was held two days before the program. During the meeting, we rehearsed and discussed every detail before the day of the program. Lucy and I were responsible for doing the minutes of the meeting as we are the group secretaries for all the arrangements. We tried to write everything that happened in all discussions.

Our primary concern for this project is the composting project at home. The updates on composting from day one until day 30 were collected in the google drive provided by Khanzalah. The reason for collecting the updates was for Khanzalah to make a timelapse video.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/eb7d7b_151678b6c3094260bf3223d3df732251/720p/mp4/file.mp4

The compost should be put in a shady area and was not supposed to be watered regularly, but I did the opposite. The result was mine did not turn into compost. I felt very sad, but I convinced myself that every cloud has a silver lining. This fail experiment can be shown to students of SAKURA as a fail compost. Because of the failed compost, we know what should and should not be done for the compost and might be an excellent example and story for the students. This was a good lesson for me to do proper research before conducting any important experiment. Luckily, one of our group members got good compost, but it took a long time to decompose. We did not shred the green waste well, and we should crush the eggshell until fine. We have learnt many things from this composting project.

Our SULAM project, Green Beyond Belief, was held online. The program was supposed to be held hybrid in which one of our group members would go there and do a live presentation on composting. But due to some unexpected thing happening to our group representative, plan B of conducting the program fully online was taken. Therefore, our program is categorised as e-SULAM.

On 14th May, we used google meet as our official platform for this e-SULAM program. Some difficulties that we faced are we knew the night before the program that we should do everything during the project in English because SAKURA is the DLP school. That night, we burned the night oil to change all Malay scripts to English. Besides, the students faced difficulties connecting to the internet and entering google meet because most of them forgot their email passwords. This causes the program to start a few minutes late. The solution taken by the club advisee was students were divided into a few groups according to the number of working devices.

The students seem not proactive because nobody volunteered to answer questions during the early presentation, either by unmuting the mic or typing in the chatbox. Surprisingly, when it was time for the question and answer session, the students asked many relevant questions related to green waste, composting and organic fertiliser. During the flashback session, they proactively answered questions given and answered the quizzes with flying colours.

The hands-on activity, which is composting with the students, will be done after Aidel fully recovers from his injury. The students were delighted to do this composting project as now they realised the benefits of composting rather than throwing rubbish into the landfills.

I applied what I learned from the lecture to this SULAM project by explaining the benefits of composting. Besides giving advantages to the soil, it will also save the environment by reducing waste thrown into the landfills. From the lecture, we know that landfill takes a lot of space as more garbage is directly thrown there rather than being separated and recycled. This will cause the increment of methane and carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere. These gases will cause the greenhouse effect. The emission of greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide can be caused by cattle and by the burning of fossil fuels. It is challenging for us to stop these two causes. This is why we need to start composting, as it could reduce the emission of carbon dioxide and methane gas into the atmosphere.\

During the SULAM project implementation, I felt very nervous at first due to some challenges we faced a few minutes before the program started. At the same time, I felt pleased because the students gave so much attention to our presentation and gave their full cooperation throughout the program. I am very relieved that the SAKURA’s teachers, the club advisee, helped us a lot before and especially during the program. From this incredible experience, I hope that cooperation between UNIMAS and SAKURA will continue, and the more great program will be held together as the year pass by.