Hi everyone, we’re really excited to tell you that we’ll be out to meet you in person this weekend – this time, we’ll be in Brickfields! 
- 27 July 2013, 10am – 5pm
- Tamil Methodist Church Kuala Lumpur
The Tamil Methodist Church Kuala Lumpur (TMCKL) is looking to raise funds for its Community Centre. I found myself drawn to supporting this particular event because they are currently running a mind-boggling array of initiatives to counsel and care for the underprivileged and marginalised section of society in Brickfields.
The people who pass through their centre range from migrant workers to those plying the sex trade, children from poor homes, drug users and alcoholics. These are the very people who desperately need meaningful gestures of kindness. Apart from providing for their basic needs (food, clothing and shelter), TMCKL even goes so far as to try to find them better jobs once they have been rehabilitated.
So this event is aiming to raise funds for them to continue providing these services, as well as to expand their premises so that they can meet the needs of even more people in the future.
Hope to see you there! Please pass the word around about this event, and bring your friends and family along if you’re coming. I have included more details about TMC and their activities below the poster if you’re keen to find out more about what they do.
About the TMCKL Community Centre
TMCKL is located amidst a very interesting community. Despite Brickfieldâ€
s recent transformation as a transportation hub, an education center as well as a business center, the street in front of our church still hosts red light areas, alcoholics, drug users and gangsters. Brickfields has also become home to a high concentration of Indian and Nepalese expatriates, as well as migrant workers and refugees.
It is amid this convergence of diverse players that TMCKL found itself opening its doors to a wide array of community services and groups:
A place for migrants to worship: Nepalese Christians and Telegu Christians from India as well as Indonesian Christians use our premises for their Sunday Services and meetings.
Learning Centre: On Saturdays, we run a Learning Centre for underprivileged children who formerly lived in the squatter community in Brickfields. At the Learning Center, they are given free tuition by volunteers. Many of these children have come to us throughout their schooling years and they have been motivated to study and do well. These children come from homes where they are not motivated to study at all.
The church hosts a local organization that rehabilitates women who want to leave the sex trade, homeless women and street women. They use our premises during the week for meetings and sessions as they work in the red light district in Brickfields and surrounding areas.
Almost every Sunday we have migrant workers or refugees walking into our premises looking for counseling or help. We have since set up a Counseling Room in our library/gift shop (because of lack of space) where trained counselors are available to talk them through their issues.
We support a single mothers group by buying homemade bread made by them and selling it at our library/gift shop/ counseling room every Sunday, to our church members.
We have a Social Concerns community service to help deal with the problems of walk in persons from the community around us – drug users, migrant workers, alcoholics and sex workers. This ministry tries to meet their most basic needs of food, clothes and shelter first. Then they are encouraged to go for rehabilitation if needed, or are directed to persons, organisations or departments outside the church that can help them with their problems. Finally, if needed this ministry also looks at ways to help them find jobs once they have come out of rehabilitation.
TMCKL also runs a Kindergarten and it is our desire to see the children have better spaces for their classes.
Because of the wide array of community services and groups we support, we are now bursting at our seams. There is hardly any space on Sunday to conduct the different services (sometimes there are up to 5-6 services running on Sundays). The Learning Centre is currently housed at our small parsonage where there is no air-conditioning and hardly enough space to fit in the number of children and volunteers we have. Some parts of the parsonage are sinking as the area was formerly a landfill.
We would like to build a Community Center that will cater to the different needs of the various groups that come to us. The Center would have more comfortable spaces for the groups to meet and have their meetings.