Just wanted to share

Came across this: - http://trisha-reloaded.blogspot.com/2006/10/2-hours-that-change-me.html today, kinda touched me.

2 hours that change me

I didn’t know what to expect. It was my first time visiting a one-room HDB flat. I had agreed to help bring a few students to visit a few of these homes that the school had adopted as part of the CIP (Community Involvement Programme). This should be good, I thought.

I wasn’t prepared for this. The walls were dotted with black splotches of what we were told were the droppings of bed bugs. We were warned not to remove our shoes, lean on the walls or sit on the floor. Mr Y sat on a stool and seemed nonchalant about the infestation in his home. The mattress he slept on bore testimony to the nightly battles he had to endure. The bed sheet was clouded with blood stains. Mr Y used to be a coolie who carried sacks of rice. The bachelor now lives alone in his decrepit rental flat, his emaciated body racked with sickness, the money he earned in his younger days long gone to feed his parents’ opium addiction many years ago. He gets $260 from the welfare agency every month, of which about $100 goes into paying his rent and utilities. The remainder he has to magically stretch to cover his food and medical costs.

The bugs had spread from next door to a few flats on the 5th floor where Mr Y lived. You could see them flitting about on the wall, on the floor, among his clothes, even along the corridors. Nobody there could afford a professional pestbuster, and the town council wouldn’t do such favours anyway. So living with these parasites has become a fact of life. Residents living on the other floors talked about the 5th floor as if it was Purgatory and it didn’t seem an inappropriate description.

Then there was 92-year-old Mdm C – so small and wiry she couldn’t have weighed more than 35kg. She had a hole in her neck where her voice box had been removed, so she couldn’t talk. When she saw us, she simply gestured with her hands that she wanted to die. Looking at her forlorn looking home, who could blame her for feeling that way? The food in her kitchen had all gone bad so we gathered she hadn’t eaten for days, or perhaps she had been eating all the rotten stuffs. When you are sick and have to depend on the kindness of neighbours to help you buy even the simplest food, what other choice do you have? She has 2 daughters, one who visits her occasionally. Another, we heard, comes by and steals the NTUC vouchers that volunteers give to her. Is it any wonder Mdm C would rather die?

In all, we visited 7 homes, each one with its own sad story to tell. My heart is exceedingly disturbed by the scenes I saw today. On the one hand, we live in a country that’s boasting of having island-wide free internet access soon and building world-class integrated resorts and yet, in pockets of this land which worships success and one-upmanship shamelessly, there are the forgotten lot who live in homes with rotten food and bug-infested beds.

I thought that by visiting the poor, I would be helping to cheer them up somewhat. How naïve I was. How arrogant I was to think that a simple 20 minute visit can alleviate the misery of people who have to face squalor every single moment of their lives and where sleep offers no respite either from the reality of their wretchedness. I thought I was doing community service. But no, something was done to me. Today, I felt as if the earth beneath my feet had shifted. In the days that follow, I would still go on to live my life of considerable comfort, plan my holidays, do Christmas shopping and enjoy the trappings of prosperity that I have been blessed with. But I could no longer plead ignorance of the shadowy existence of Mr Y, Mdm C and all these unfortunate people who live just a stone’s throw away from me. I find myself asking Him, “Lord, what will You have me do now?”

Tonight, as I crawl between my nice clean sheets, I think of Mr Y and how long the night will be for him. I saw real, in-your-face poverty and human misery today and I’m at a loss as to how to respond. Nothing I can do or say will ever be enough. And yet, if we don’t do anything, what kind of human beings are we?

* * * * * * * * *

Juxtaposed among my anguished thoughts about Mr Y and Mdm C is the noisy ranting of an 18-year-old college kid with her “elite uncaring face”. And this is what I want to say.

There is no glory in being an elite. No honour in trumpeting one’s own success. For if not by a fortunate roll of the dice of life, any of us could end up like Mr Y or Mdm C. Any of us could be born into a family visited by sorrow upon sorrow, where circumstances work against you and fate tosses you around like sand, so that you can’t get out of the shit even if you want to. So for those of us in which life has been unbelievably kind to us, a good measure of gratitude and humility is called for. Survival of the fittest is the rule for the animal kingdom. Surely we are above the beasts? Surely we are meant to rise up higher? Instead of dashing to be the first, perhaps it is far nobler to slow down, and give a hand to the downtrodden, the unfortunate, the unskilled, the retrenched, the slower, the old, the sickly and the poor. When we can restore even a modicum of dignity to our fellow beings who have no hope, surely that makes us more human.

Wei's sidenote: This blog entry made me think about the recent incident whereby the man commited suicide by jumping into the tracks of an oncoming train. When I read about these incidents, I always experience a conflicting disarray of emotions.

I was neither born into an 'elite, uncaring' (favourite phrase of October) well-to-do family, nor a downtrodden family living in poverty. But I find it hard to believe how these people could become so forgotten, could've been left behind for so long, amidst our world-class resorts, world-class fountains and world-class whatever you could think of.

But I couldn't help wondering, apart from the aged, sick and helpless, could we really deteriorate to such poverty in Singapore?

Dun be mistaken, I could relate very well to the living conditions as described in the blog entry above. After all, I stayed in a one room flat for nearly 6 years of my life. The corridors were dim, the only light you could see was a tiny opening at the end of the long rows of flats on each side.

The corridors were barely a metre wide, and each door you bypass emits almost a different stinking odour of it's own.

It was the odour of urine, faeces, stale unchanged clothes. It was the odour of perpetually drunk men, drug addicts chasing the dragon, unwashed and neglected children whom have never known a day of school.

It was the odour of despair, the hopeless, the dying and occasionally, the dead.

Every now and then, a lonely old person would pass on in their tiny flats, forgotten and never to be missed by the living, until the stench of their decomposing corpses finally compels the neighbours to call the police. (You see, most people there would like to have as little to do with the police as possible.)

Ever so often, the patrol cars would arrive in swarms, usually in the middle of the night, to arrest yet another petty murderer or drug addict. Yeah, we've got plenty of manpower and not exactly alot to do anyway, so why take chances?

Never walk along the unsheltered areas above these flats, I soon learnt that many residents' favourite pasttime is to bag their urine and faeces and hurl it from their flats on the next stupid person walking downstairs in the open. At night, some of them like to hurl their empty beer bottles downstairs. I believe they were going for the stray cats, but it is a bonus if it hits a human too.

I have seen many hardworking old people in my 6 years there, in Jalan Kukoh, determined to survive and be independant. Their carts laden with cardboards, begged off the rows of shops, are always too heavy for their frail bodies to push. Many survive on less than $200 a month, but they could still manage to offer a starving stray cat a fish when they see one.

In an ironic sense, kitty eats up fish and rub old lady's feet gratefully and affectionately, only to turn around the corner to be kicked incessantly on it's soft furry body by an abled but frustrated young man.

You see, there are two sides to these group of people. Some of them really deserved it, and I am not even a mean person for saying this today.

Why didn't you choose to take on a lower paying job when you know there are bills to pay and maybe even mouths to feed? As a matter of fact, why not two jobs?

Why do you even choose to have kids when you could barely feed your wife?

How does an abled person ever become so poor in Singapore?

By believing that next weekend you would strike 4-D and you would be set for the rest of your lifetime. (ie. These kind of things hor, hard to say one, cause hor everyone got san suay lok ong mah, my turn will come you just see..)

By believing that every job is too low-class for you (ie. Sales? I think I would be good at it, only I don't like to serve peepur lah. Driver? Pay too low, only if it is $2k a month and the vehicle is a cute little Kangoo and they allow me to drive home lah! Cleaner? U r kidding rite? Siao ar!)

Not making a sweeping statement here, the above are just examples of what my ex-husband like to say during his last 13 years of unemployment. But I believe it speaks true for many of his kind.

I would love to bash Ms Wee's 'elite, uncaring' face in, but you know what? She has a point too.

Selective and subjective applications.

Never easy to handle systematically as a nation and government body but hey, that's why you guys are our million dollar cabinet gahment.

I neber compraint about your salaries, did I?