Shielding Virus, Spreading Love
Shielding Virus, Spreading Love
Hong Yuh Dong’s Story
Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine
BBiomedSc
Hong Yuh Dong from Malaysia is always keen to explore medicine-related topics. As an active seeker for career opportunities, he has interned at labs before, and is planning to intern in big pharmaceutical companies in Hong Kong in the future. He hopes that he could influence and contribute to the community through his work in the lab.
Dong is also the President of University YMCA (HKU) 7th Student Executive Committee. YMCA (HKU) aims to organize social service activities and events that can connect students of HKU and other universities in Hong Kong. As president of the organization, Dong has to constantly brainstorm meaningful social events that can bridge between students and the community.
In response to the COVID-19 situation, Dong initiated the mixed mode service programme “Volunteering from Home – Shielding Virus Spreading Love”. Dong has been keen on improving the healthcare services in Hong Kong since his study in HKU – the pandemic situation gave him the perfect opportunity to do so. Originally Dong wanted to help with doctors and nurses in Hong Kong. As he did more research on the healthcare problem in Hong Kong, he realized that government cleaners were in more dire need of help – they were working extra hours but weren’t given sufficient health devices.
Dong organized two sessions for this event. In the first session, he taught participants how to make a face shield from magic tape, elastic band, an A4 sized plastic sheet. They also made an anti-pandemic pack which includes the face shield, facemasks, a hand sanitizer, a DIY appreciation card and packed them in a bag which was cut from old YMCA t-shirts. Dong had to mail the items to the participants to assemble the face shield during the zoom call. In the second session, Dong led the participants to 4 rubbish collection points to distribute their anti-pandemic packs to over 40 government cleaners. One week before the event, Dong went to the rubbish collection points and communicated with the location supervisors about their agenda.
“To serve but not to be served”
Dong’s exposure through this event has given him more momentum to organize more future projects. He saw that government cleaners were highly insufficient in demand and were not equipped and trained to clean quarantine centres, hotels, rubbish bins using the appropriate measures. He thinks that there’s still a lot more to be done to improve healthcare services at this stage, and he hopes to find members with similar thoughts so they can go hand-in-hand.
Dong finds serving people a very meaningful thing to do. Moving forward, he plans to collaborate with an NGO to organize similar projects on offering healthcare services to homeless people in Mong Kok or Sham Shui Po.
Written by:
Nicholas Ng
Year 2, Faculty of Business and Economics (HKU Business School)
November 2020