The young and the restless.

With thanks to Angeline Lee


steadyaku47 comment : Another point of view.

December 13, 2011

DEC 13 — Last week on the wards, one of my elderly patients told me I was “far too young” to be talking to unwell people all day. The youngest medical students in the hospital over here are third-year medical students, who, on average, are between 20-21 years old.

Can we wade through this whirlpool of emotions and emerge intact regardless? Yes, we can. In fact, many of us are not conventional 21 year olds anymore. We have seen and heard people’s life stories. We have to deal with ill and dying patients. We have seen how bad things can get. And we have also seen how a bit of hope can make even the worst illness become a tiny bit more livable. We see strength and resilience amid disaster on a daily basis.

In my recent articles I have always endeavoured to err on the side of optimism when discussing our homeland, which I have a great attachment to. And that gets me a lot of negative comments saying that I am naïve, and informing me that I need to grow up. But who needs to grow up here — me, who believes that it is possible to improve our country by putting aside what is personal and petty, and focus instead on working together to smooth out the kinks; or these people, who prefer to sit at the side to criticise and hold grudges against those who are working towards the outcome of making people believe that things can get better?

I may be young and hopeful, but that doesn’t make me wrong.

Even the patients who are on their deathbeds can find some hope somewhere. Who are we to just give up and say that it’s all over before we even started trying to do something about it?

Malaysia isn’t a bad country at all. We’ve got amazing people, cultures, traditions, food, geography and lots of other things that everyone outside can respect. In every mamak stall you will find at least two people sitting there complaining about the state of things, not realising that we could be going through so much worse.

When did we forget to be grateful for what we have? Really, the only thing holding us back from progress is our own stubborn determination to wallow in our issues, complain and feel sorry for ourselves without even thinking about what can be done.

There are so many opportunities in Malaysia. So many hitherto unexplored areas. A huge untested market to tap into and make great things happen. A lot of potential to provide services and a lot of people keen to use them. 

If I wanted to learn the cello in Malaysia, there are only a handful of people who are teaching it, and precious few shops stocking even one cello, giving you a limited variety. You would also worry that after you spend the thousands of ringgit buying it, nobody is going to know how to repair it if something happens to it.

Here in Bristol, a city in the UK about the size of Malacca city, there are at least 30 cello teachers and at least four stores which sell them in the city centre itself. Kids in school here play in orchestras and do amazing things because they love to, while a lot of our kids spend all their time trying to pass PMR and SPM, jumping through the hoops to fulfil their co-curricular requirements for their CVs in the future. There is talent and passion swimming around the population of our country. We just haven’t had the chance to unlock this resource yet.

So in conclusion, this article just aims to make the point that to be hopeful is not to be stupid, because Malaysia is on the way to achieving great things. Let the discussion in the comments below move away from pointing fingers and lamenting, and change instead to include interesting and intelligent discussions about what we can do to improve ourselves from this moment forward.

* Angeline Lee is a medical undergraduate at the University of Bristol.

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.