OLE Toa Payoh

A very hectic afternoon with visitors swarming in... I was stationed at the check-in counter. Toa Payoh HDB hub is definitely a more ideal place to hold the exhibition as compared to Woodlands as its more spacious and airy and it's very near my house! hahahah....

However, today's shift was the most problematic one as compared to the other 3. There were some problems with the mp3 chargers as 1 mp3 charger could only charge two mp3 players at one go...hence there were a small pile of mp3 players awaiting to charge...worse still there were many battery flat cases as visitors while jus halfway through the tracks when the mp3 player went dead!

A very cumbersome situation indeed as they will have to u-turn back to the check-in counter and wait for replacement before proceeding on! The pace and the flow of the story-telling is disturb in the meantime. I also realised that visitors came in a whole caboodle at one point of time and at the next moment, the check-in counter was empty. So one moment we will be super busy setting up the mp3 players and before we realised it, we were counting flies and chit-chatting away. LOL! Time passed by in a wink.

Hmmm, today's visitors were mainly students, tertiary students, about our age dropped in for a tour. There is also a group of Korean students, together with their language teacher, from some international school, came in to have a look. We were rather trapped at that time as they were not enuf mp3 players to cater to the group.

Pamphlets and soveniours placed near the exist

Some of the interesting posters

One Life Experience (OLE) exhibition (Singapore)

The World AIDS day is held on the 1st of dec every year. This year, the World Vision Organisation was launching a One life Experience walkthrough exhibition to allow visitors to be immersed in the lives of young people living with AIDS and also to increase the awareness of HIV/AIDS. It will be held at 4 different venues from Dec 1 - Feb 3.

At the start of this dec, I have been performing a 3-day stint as a volunteer in the OLE exhibition held in a tent that was bulit outside Woodlands Civic Center. During these 3 days, I have filled in at 3 different stations, the check-in counter, health clinic and check-out counter.

The exhibition was a rather small-scale kind and this was also my first time volunteering in such event. The exhibition was structured in a maze-like form. It was divided into 3 foot-tracks, based on the real-life account story of Beatrice from Africa, Srey Mom from Cambodia and Ah Hock from Singapore. These 3 foot-tracks will ultimately end at the health clinic before proceeding on to the reflection corner, the jotting of notes of encouragements to the HIVs/AIDS patients area and the bracelet-making section before reaching the check-out counter.

I daresay this exhibition was definitely worth a visit as not only its free of charge, the style of presentation and the way of story-telling through an audio-set issued can really intrigue and create a strong impact on the visitors (also provided that you really follow the tracks and narrator closely). Hey, i even saw a middle-age woman break down and cried after the visit during the 1st day.

On the whole, though there were some hiccups occurred during the exhibition, still it proceed smoothly as the event has received sizeable number of positive responses from the visitors.