Let's start with a very lame introduction shall we. It's a nice Sunday in August and I said it's nice because it's few days till my nerve-wrecking electives presentation and yea i laid in bed for novels and haven't started to worry a thing. In order to get something productive done - or rather keeping myself off the pillows - I've decided to revive this old place of mine - talking about the one weird event we have had.

It's called the Medical Academic Fair, or else because we couldn't come up with a better, rather catchy name for it- so off it goes as one of the 'important' event under Medsoc. And then they reckon the name is not nice enough so a slogan with 'experience it!' will suffice. I won't know what drove me inside the committee board, but just it seems like i hoped to help or something - naaaaa i do not know. So i offered myself to take on the talk - which i figure just settling the speaker and the venue and publicize will do. But things go miraculously incredible after that, first being Dr Winson Seow declaring he was "faking his medical qualifications and for misleading the public about his relief work in war-zone countries" and he apologized for that matter. I was startled when I read about that - apart of wondering how Julies would have arranged his talks for him without checking like real checking his backgrounds. All right the other thing is I really was doomed because I just lost one big speaker that initially his spokesman assure me that I can go for booking Dewan Tunku Canselor because the talk will definitely attract a big crowd.

So a talk will not go without a speaker. The second thing was me finding myself searching through google keying in 'Inspirational Doctor Talk Malaysia' or asking my mom whether the division of doctors from Tzu Chi can make me any good. Naahhhh none of those returned me satisfactory results, simply because a talk given by a doctor makes it sounds like a lecture more than a talk.

The headache went for months (or weeks? Can't remember) until one day a dental friend of mine is putting up a status saying that Medecins San Frontierer is giving a talk in Dewan i-forgot-the-name of the Faculty of Medicine. Now doctors without borders sounded more convincing isn't it? :D I will not ever forget the day when Shun Herng and I went for it. When Mr Jaggu Singh, the Human Resource Director of the MSF base in Hong Kong asked us to introduce ourselves - we sheepishly answered "Second year medical student.." while other doctors are answering fluently about their service in X country, Y Hospital and went to an MSF mission for Zth time. Well despite the embarrassing encounter the talk was interesting, and I guess Shun Herng mustered all his strength and went to a nice lady at the back who introduced herself as a nurse at the field and told her our intentions. And thanks to her, the kind lady Mathina who introduced us to the other people in MSF, we had our talk back then :)

It was rounds and rounds of e-mail and the day arrived. I was nervous and worried till the last minute-because what i had been thinking all along is real. Had you been to a talk where the speaker is ready and there's no audience inside? Dr Streram had been sitting in front of the lecture hall and I am so thankful that i had the couple - Shun Herng and Ling Hui to talk to him to make things nice. And I won't know what's a nicer thing than your friends helping you to call out to those in hostels to come and attend your talk because it's empty. Mathina who was initially not part of the program showed up after taking a bus from her home in Bangsar - insisted to share her experience while she had a chance. I was so into bursting into tears when I saw her. :') I'm so thankful to have Kai Xian to help out with the PA, and Naomi to be the emcee and at last - we are sitting to a talk with 20+ audience. God bless the night.

Yea the ones in the photo are mostly the audience of the night. By all means I sincerely thank everyone. Special thanks to YiYang who helped to send Mathina home.

When the Sunday came - things are getting a little nicer I think. The sponsors who we met in person had shown up to exhibit their products, and guess yea Tecky's effort to borrow some parasite exhibit from Prof Suresh did worked to attract some crowd to stop by after they withdraw their money from the ATM :) Things worked out great too after that - we had much fun with the bandages and CPR and choking charlie :) Oh yea I met Wen Jing who happened to know me soooo hello :)


I'm pretty sure I bored you reading until this point - but I'm not yet finished. We are combining the medical singing competition where you compose your own medical lyrics and fit it into any songs, and the closing ceremony together that night. Well now imagine the auditorium filled with 25% audiences. It was disastrous, i knew, and it turned out to be one of the funniest night in my whole second year life. We had Raja singing the Planet song edited from Maroon 5's Daylight and yeaaa the way she put it - ruined the whole thing and we are getting teary from laughing.  

Thanks to Prof Victor and Prof Cheng for showing up no matter how disastrous it looks - and yea what an unbelievable event! With few manpower and few audiences as well *nahh I'm being sarcastic from the starting until now :S* Yeaa this had probably stopped me from any more audience-needing activities :S This post might be completely pointless but it records the weird event which happened for the first time in UM's history and i'm writing this because i've heard people saying ''if it's nice it's memories, if it sucks it's called experience" :)