Last Saturday, my husband and I got the golden opportunity to become one of the volunteers for ‘Shopping Raya 2013’ for Baitul Ehsan orphaned kids. This program was organised by Projek Iqra.

The home is located in Taman Maluri, Kuala Lumpur. The program said to start at 8.am, but we arrived at 7.45am. Call us eager, and yes we were. After waiting for the rest of the volunteers to arrive, the program finally started at 9am. It started with the opening speech from the founder of the home, also the caretaker. He spent his own fortune to build this home, and this home rely on people’s donation money as it is not under any organisation.

He and his wife started with renting a house, (and they are still renting) and now they recently bought a new house next door and the renovation just finished, earlier than planned. It cost them almost RM600k to buy the house, and they renovated the house into a three-story house (the rest of the houses are two-story) for RM200k. All from donations money, MashaAllah! Now, they have about 63 kids and the boys had to be placed in another house Gombak due to the lack of space.

I had to hold back my tears as I listened to founder talking about the background of some of these kids. There are cases where the kids came knocking at 3am in the morning, traveled far to find shelter. Not all of them are orphans, some come from a single parent family who are unable to take care of their kids.

Some kids have been here for all their lives, they were sent here since they were as young as 10 days old. Baitul Ehsan do not actually take in babies, but sometimes when people asked, they just didn’t have the hearts to say no.

The kids here are so blessed. They are so smart and well-behaved. One kid already went to Jordan to further their studies and another kid is going to Indonesia, with help of sponsors. These kids here are being taught to recite Quran and memorize them. The aim is to give them Maahad Tahfiz education. Other than Quran and Islamic studies, they are also learning academic basics such as maths, science, English and Bahasa.  They don’t go to public schools, all of them are home schooled, and they have teachers coming in everyday to teach them.

Anyway, my husband and I were assigned to bring 2 kids to shop for new clothes. Aiman and Fadhli, both 12 years old. Aiman eventually warmed up to us, while Fadhli is a really timid kid. After we got our kids for the day, we headed to Tesco Ampang. (We weren’t allowed to bring to any other places. Strictly.)

Handing over the kids; Aiman (left) and Fadhli (right).

Photo time before shopping! Note the tallest house in the background is the Baitul Ehsan Home. 🙂

They both were clear on getting robes or Jubah. Finding the robes were the hardest, there weren’t much choice for their size. They are at that odd age where they are too big for kids clothes, yet too small for the smallest adult size. In the end, they settled for Kurta. I feel bad for them because their Kurtas are slightly too big!

See what I mean? They look really nice, but it’s just too big! :/ We tried to reason with them to find baju Melayu instead. But they strongly insisted on getting the Kurtas. Oh well, as long as they’re happy.

Almost done with shopping, and they were already happy! Had to force a smile upon Fadhli though, he was so shy! Hehe

Next, we  got them some shoes. It was easy to find shoes for Aiman, he is still very much a boy, and he knew what he wanted. Fadhli is in that transition phase into becoming a teen, and he doesn’t really know what he wanted. In the end, to my relief, he finally found something he liked, with Eddie’s help.
We also got them some perfume, which they love. That was the easiest. I think, however, the thing that they were most keen on was getting a watch. From the beginning, they just couldn’t wait to get a watch, I could tell. So I paid for their watches. Aiman got this really cool LED-ish digital watch, while Fadhli got the G-shock-ish watch. They pretty much raced towards the watch shop when I said, it’s time to get them a some watches!

Getting the watches was definitely the highlight of their day!

Finally, we are done shopping!

The watch concluded our shopping and we returned them to Baitul Ehsan. On dropping them, we went into the house to take a look, and mashaAllah, I can feel that the people in the house are so so blessed. I can feel so many blessings from Allah, I don’t know how to explain it.

While I was in there, I could see the happy faces of Aiman and Fadhli going through and showing their friends the new stuff they got. I also saw the happy faces for the rest of other kids. It was priceless. So, we forced Aiman to pray us for a Ferrari. HAHAHA. Hey, doa anak yatim makbul tau! Even the ustazahs there know, so she asked them to say ‘Amin’ for us. =P

Then, we said our goodbyes to the kids. Everyone knows that I’m not a kid person, however with them, it felt different.  There was this instant ‘love’ for these kids.

Being a volunteer certainly is a whole new level of contributing. It’s not something everyone capable of doing. We always think all they need is money. But sometimes we forget that they also need love. And if you can give that to someone, trust me, the satisfaction is just priceless. Now, I understand how fair Allah is. He will only give to those who are willing to give. That’s how it should be. The money that we get is never ours. He can take it from us anytime. But, if we are willing to give, Allah will give us more.

We, as the more fortunate ones, are just Allah’s ‘postmen’ to give our money to the poor and those in need.

I wish that I could be wealthy someday so that I can provide homes to these orphans and able to support them until their tertiary studies. InshaAllah..

Thank you Projek Iqra for this organizing this wonderful program. Alhamdulillah.

Here is a video montage for the program: