My Review of 8th Penang Company

I’ve always been interested in seeing how companies operate. Since a young age I’ve been visiting other companies in KL-Selangor which were within my reach (often times without Captains notice and sometimes results me in being late for my own parade). My curiosity lies in how differently other companies run their programmes, company size and general dynamics of the company – what makes them tick. These same fascinations lead me to Penang where I visited the 8th Penang Company.

Penang is the birthplace of the Boys’ Brigade in Malaysia. The company I visited was the 8th Penang Company based in Chung Ling (Government) Secondary School, Penang. It’s a relatively new BB school base about 10 years old or so. The company itself has consistently been one of the better companies in Penang (based on their track record over the years). Right next door is the other Chung Ling (Private) which only recently has become the platoon for 16th Penang (or was it 18th Penang? Hmm) BB is the second biggest group in Chung Ling, loosing out only to the scouts. They also have a strong reputation with footdrill being placed high during the 2003 Pesta being the 1st Runner up. Chung Ling is also one of the top schools in Penang. Its size was bigger than my college (Taylor’s College)!

8th Penang’s other schools includes SMK Air Itam (and one or two I can’t remember..). Each “platoon” has a reasonable size of 80 active members. (note: Their term platoon represents a school base in comparison to 3rd KL’s platoon, whereby a platoon is simply a section comprising a few squads.). When combined during Enrolment Service at the Air Itam Chinese Methodist Church and Founders Day when the whole company gathers as one their number easily exceed 300 members. Remember that this is an all Boys company. In comparison to 1st JB, the largest company on Peninsula Malaysia which has a membership of 300 members as well (also has 3 school platoons), 1st JB comprise of girls as well. This makes 8th Penang Company, technically, the biggest company on West Malaysia. There’s also an active Girls’ Brigade company attached to the church and school which has a mutual relationship with the BB.

Sounds all good doesn’t it? Now here’s the catch. They meet from 8-10.30am, only 12 times a year. Apparently, that’s normal for most of the companies in Penang (in comparison a typical KL company meet for 5-6 hours, which meets non-stop all year round with 40-52 weeks), 3rd KL being 12.30-5.45pm if you’re in Senior Section. Apparently they don’t even have time to conduct badge work and relies on Awards Camp to cover their syllabus all in only a few days. I’ve not been able to see their normal parade as they were practicing how to do recruitment drive, but it’ll be interesting to see how they maintain the level of interest in their Boys within such a limited amount of time. The reason for their time limitations are because of school regulations which disallows BB and all other uniform groups to meet beyond a certain amount of time.

This was a reminder to me of how blessed we are in 3rd KL. We complain that we don’t have enough time for anything. Some of us resign, some of us give up, some of us say we are doing too much and so on. But our Brothers in Penang are going through a huge difficulty with time constraints and they have the desire to expand their range of activities but are not able to. Perhaps we should learn how to appreciate what we have and make full use of our time rather than complain.

I also had much to learn from their Captain, Mr. Teh Gim Beng. During his time, he was the youngest Captain in Malaysia (the year he was appointed, not a record, but still young). When I first met him (I didn’t know he was the Captain then), he was very friendly, humble and extremely approachable guy. No wonder his member look up to him. Nowadays, a lot of people with authority are quite snobbish and full of pride (yep, sadly in BB too). All the Boys from his batch are now the ones running the show where all of them are only in their early 30s.

My visit of the 8th Penang Company was indeed an eye opener. Towards the end of parade there was a Boy who approach his awards officer to have his craft (now Arts Badge) project assessed. It reminded me again that although we’re geographically far apart, we’re actually the same in nature. BB’s about building people up.