My stressful week in UKM

This week at work was so stressful. Several tasks were assigned to my communication department and to me in specific. One of them was to do a country presentation at work on Wednesday 12^th. Another one is to do at least two blog posts and write reflection after the workshop I conduct and to write news letter. Finally, the most important task was to give a workshop to high school students.

    The purpose of the country presentation is to introduce Egypt, its culture, heritage, traditions and the problems facing the country. During the presentation, I tried to represent my country well and to touch on the misconception about the Egyptians as Muslim Arabs or “Pharaohs”. I also talked about my educational experience at AUC and the cultural shock that I had during my first week in Malaysia.

    Another task was to conduct the first workshop. Before the first workshop, I was concerned about the big number of attendees and their young age. Most of the students range from 12 to 14 years old, which means that it might be hard to control them. Another challenge was that they might not be familiar with my accent in English. Not only this, but understanding some English and medical terms might also be hard. For this, intensive preparations were essential to avoid any difficulties during the workshop. Another thing that my team was concerned about is that it is a conservative school, so we decided to eliminate parts of our topic such as condom demonstration, oral and penetrative sex and to mention them quickly without detailed explanation.

   After the workshop, and in general, the outcome was satisfactory, especially that this was the first time  AIESEC has a workshop attended by that big number

   Although the students seemed bored in the middle of the workshop, we tried to have games to energize them.  The students were following most of the time with the MCs, which was obvious when they were asked some questions and they were able to answer most of them. If the team succeeded to correct, at least, one misconception about HIV AIDS or make them understand only one fact about the epidemic, it is satisfactory
Hend El-Taher