By Pr Sarah Cheong
“A carwash! That’s what we’ll do. A carwash will be able to raise money.”
And with that, our plans for our fundraising event began.
The planning began a month before the day of the actual event. It involved a lot of communication between us girls and the officers too. First, we had to set a date. Our initial plan was to have it on the 17th of March 2012. However, our plan backfired because an event was being held in our church on that day. I guess it was a blessing in disguise from God, for us to postpone our fundraiser. We ended up agreeing to have it on the 31st of March instead.
After all the planning was done, we had to put our plan into action. This involved a lot of advertising and making sure we had all the equipment needed. I had the opportunity to assist the chairperson, YL Leong Yen May, and was involved in the publicity. To be honest, I was very nervous when advertising this event on Facebook and through word of mouth. This was simply because I was afraid there would be a poor response to our fundraiser. Praise the Lord that my fears were pushed aside and thrown away, for on that day…
We had an overwhelming response from our customers! Our customers consisted of church members, friends and many parents of members of the Girls’ Brigade and Boys’ Brigade. To me, the blessing in disguise that helped our event become a success was that our fundraiser happened to fall on the same day as the Boys’ Brigade’s Awards day. When I first proposed that particular date, I honestly had no clue there would be another event on that day too!
On the day of the event, at 10 in the morning, we discovered that we only had one tap available for use! At first, I was worried because I was doubtful of whether we could achieve our goal of raising RM350. However, I soon started to worry about a different issue when we got started at 10.30am. Out of the blue, there were 6 cars to be washed then! I was horrified and excited at the same time. Horrified that we only had one water source to be shared among 6 cars, and excited that we may actually achieve our target, all at the same time.
Slowly, we adjusted to our condition. The first 6 cars took almost a total of 2 hours to finish washing and vacuuming. It took time, but we managed to earn RM90 with satisfied smiles. Soon, we learnt how to work as a team and our working speed increased.
Throughout the 8 hours of our working time, we managed to wash a total of 49 vehicles and we also washed the Church van for free! The most challenging vehicle to wash was most definitely the Church van. We had to climb chairs just to wash the roof of the van and washing it was also difficult but we enjoyed it. And our Juniors even helped out too. The bonding moments between us girls can be created anytime.
This project has helped us to learn a few valuable lessons. A lesson most of us learned is that through teamwork we can all achieve our goals much easier than expected. This is a lesson which can be applied almost anywhere and at anytime. Besides that, we also learned that if we start doing something (washing cars), we must put our best effort at it and do our best, or we will have to rewash! As for me, I learned that we should always be optimistic when we start a task as you’ll never know what surprises could happen later on. A great amount of thanks has to be expressed to the people who supported our event but the BIGGEST thank you has to be given to God. He stopped the rain and provided a beautiful weather for us. Now, we can say that through that one day, we washed cars in the rain, in the hot sun and also under the cloudy weather. That’s about it for this article of mine. Oh yeah, did I mention we earned RM900 plus? 1st Kuala Lumpur Girls’ Brigade BOLEH! (:
-this report was featured on Wesley Methodist Church KL's Wesley Tidings June 2012 issue
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