Saturday, March 27, 2010
(Above) Students checking rations of basic necessities that will be distributed to impoverished families in the Brunei-Muara and Tutong Districts, as part of the charity project. Pictures: BT/Ubaidillah MasliWHAT was initially course work for seven students of the Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD) Faculty of Business Economics and Policy Studies (FBEPS) has transformed into a student-led charity project benefiting 60 impoverished families in Brunei.
The students are now drumming up support from the greater UBD community to help the other less fortunate.
Led by Md Anwar Hj Mohammad, the seven students had the primary aim of searching for the underlying causes of poverty in the Sultanate, as one of the project modules under their project, "An exploratory study of poverty in Brunei Darussalam".
The research is based on the living conditions of families and individuals registered to receive financial assistance from the government and are "deemed poor", Md Anwar explained.
"The poverty situation (in Brunei) is actually very serious, but unfortunately not many are aware of it," said Md Anwar. "So I urge the public to step in; not as a way to eradicate poverty but as a way to help them (the less fortunate) achieve something.
"This started out as a simple project where we would go to people's houses who are deemed (to be in) poverty and interview them from our set of questionnaires. It later turned into something charitable when one of the students donated something like a bag of rice."
More and more students soon rallied to their cause and after seeking financial support from Bank Islam Brunei Darussalam (BIBD), the FBEPS managed to raise enough funds to accommodate the needs of 60 families.
"Initially, we interviewed 100 families in Brunei-Muara and Tutong (Districts) and planned to give them a set of necessities but... we decided to reduce it to 60 families because of our upcoming examinations which gives us only a month to distribute it to them."
Md Anwar said they tracked down the poor through a list of recipients of Zakat obtained from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, welfare from Department of Community Development (Japem) and housing assistance recipients from Yayasan Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah (YSHHB).
"We gathered the information from all three lists and then we coordinated the visits and went to their houses," the FBEPS leader said.
"We were able to visit all the houses in 10 trips over five weeks, but all only on Tuesdays and Fridays, last month."
Lending a hand were members of the UBD Volunteering & Charity Club (UVC). "This week, our help was needed for the packaging of the necessity sets and then next week we'll be helping with the delivery of the sets to the less fortunate," Norhazimah Hj Johari, captain of the UVC, said. "They asked for our help because the seven of them wouldn't be able to take on such a big task alone so we accepted being an influential voluntary group."
Nuratiqah Raduan, humanitarian planner for the UVC, said, "It's a very worthy cause because this kind of project is what we look for for the UVC activities."
About 30 members of the UVC took part in yesterday's packaging stage and more will join during the delivery stage next week.
According to Md Anwar, the delivery of the basic necessities rations will commence next Friday. The volunteers will split into three groups, covering five houses a day over the following two weeks, using their own transport in their own free time, he said.
The Brunei Times
Source: The Brunei Times
