Simplicity is Happiness
Simplicity is Happiness
Yeung Megan Ho Ching's Story
CEDARS Service Awardee of 24th Recognition Ceremony – Gold Award
Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine
BNurs
In her second year, Megan has already been awarded the Gold Award for CEDARS Reward Scheme. She involved herself in CEDARS’ Special Educational Needs (SEN) Peer Impact Network (PIN), contributing to various activities such as study support, HEaRT@cafe330, and audio description.
Understanding the difficulty one faces in the language barrier, she took the initiative to provide audio description and survival Cantonese to help the international students settle into Hong Kong. “Simplicity is happiness,” Megan claims, for she does not teach anything complex. She only wishes to extend a hand to the international students and promote inclusiveness by teaching them simple Cantonese for use in daily lives, such as ordering food or asking for a stop on a bus ride.
Apart from reaching out to international students, Megan also helped raise awareness and sensitivity of disability-related issues. As part of a study support inclusive gathering, Megan had to sit in a wheelchair, and her group must go through a planned routine. Throughout the activity, Megan understood how people with wheelchairs feel because she put herself in their shoes for the event.
“To treat them like how we would ourselves and view them as what we think is a ‘normal person’.”
“Nearly all passersby looked at me, making me feel unwelcomed and ‘unique’. After that, when I step back and think, we always consider how we can equip the environment to facilitate the disabled, but we have overlooked the simplest thing we can do, which is to treat them like how we would ourselves and view them as what we think is a ‘normal person’.”
Most activities were suspended or cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While some of them turned online (including Megan’s Cantonese lessons), there are limitations in presentation or work that the Peer Impact Network can do. Megan found it difficult to follow up for individual needs or specific events such as artwork making. Nevertheless, she perseveres in her commitments because she is dedicated to give back to the community.
From such diverse activities Megan experienced from SEN PIN, she is incredibly grateful for the opportunity to experience a care receiver’s perspective, which is hard to picture in mind.
“This experience allowed me to understand how the current situation is from care receivers and what we can do more. As a nurse, we cannot choose patients and we serve everyone who is in need, no matter if they have a disability.”
Providing Cantonese lessons to students exposed her to many different kinds of people with various backgrounds, whilst putting herself in study support allowed her to have a new perspective on people with disabilities. With this, Megan believes to be able to provide more considerate care to society both physically and psychologically in the future from her various experiences.
Written by:
Samantha Ho
Year 4, Faculty of Business and Economics (HKU Business School)
March 2021