First Day of 2016, Full of Optimism!

As I am writing this, I am sitting at HBB Clinic Phnom Penh, on 1^st January 2016, 3.35 PM. The weather has been very good throughout the day, clear skies, warm but windy. One side of our clinic is surrounded by water, which makes the environment around our clinic yet cooler and serene.
The clinic is much lively today, with our HBB team members, HBB clinic staffs, and 30 volunteers from 3 different universities all gathering here for a briefing followed by training session for a community survey around the clinic area tomorrow. Perhaps seeing the crowd of people at our clinic, many of the local kids also came to see what was going on, and in the end joined us at our clinic.
All of them just had lunch at our clinic this afternoon, followed by a briefing session led by my cousin who volunteered with us for the past 2 weeks. Right now the 30 of them are broken down to 5 groups, each having their training session at different parts of the clinic. Some stayed at the lunch place, some into the meeting room, some went to our consultation room.

I love to see all these students at work, and am very thankful for their hard work for HBB. As I look around the clinic, I see faces full of hope and lighted up with excitement. As I sit here writing at the consultation table as each group is having their own session, an overwhelming feeling came over me. It is the kind of feeling that I can never begin to explain. A feeling of happiness, thankfulness, peacefulness and purpose. It feels good to leverage a whole group of talented people coming from all corners of Malaysia, to come here to a piece of foreign land 2000 kilometres from home to do this house-to-house survey and medical check-up.

I know I can never capture this moment into a single picture, and the only way to do justice is to write about it.

Right from the beginning, I know I want to do this all my life. I want to spend a lifetime of service, not just doing it myself, but influencing and convincing more and more people to do the same. For all of us, HBB is not just an organization, it has a lot more to do with our personal lives. We didn't have to compartmentalize any of our life’s ambitions: family, good friends, professional passion or philanthropic mission. They all converged into a single goal. Someday when I can sustain HBB to be a full-time career, I will never again have to choose the time between family, friends, work, and charity. With HBB, it all converges into one. I guess this convergence will be my new year’s resolution…this year and years ahead