Charity work in Singapore

The word CAS stands for "Creativity,Action, Service" and it is one of those things that all IB students have to go through, spending 50 hours minimum on each aspect. Having my after school activities to help fill up the hours needed for creativity and service, I am stuck with the task of earning 50 hours of service by my lonesome. Having my friend pull some strings for me, I managed to enroll myself into a charity event. 

Basically the charity work involves us collecting food donations from Singapore Food Industries and delivering it to the old folks of Singapore who need it most. These people are registered under the organisation, albeit after much scrutiny and investigation into their background so as to ensure that we are giving it to the right people. 

To me, with every Singaporean citizen having statistically 50000 SGD per capita, I find it hard to believe that selective Singaporeans are in need of any financial help. That is, until I carried out the charity work. 

Being part of a 3-man team, we went off to areas around Bishan, where low income families are found. As many people say, these places are the heartlands where true Singaporeans are found. These refer to people who have lived in Singapore all their lives and nowhere else (often due to financial issues) and have fully embraced the culture of Singapore. Such behaviours include the use of Singlish and other habits which are exclusively found in Singaporeans. 

We carried out our jobs, visiting a total of 16 houses over the course of 2 and a half hours. For every flat I visit, I find it sad that these people have been left living by themselves with no care from their other relatives despite being extremely old to the point that they cannot walk at all or have other medical conditions which cause them to have a lack in mobility. Often their houses smell due to their disability to clean or wash their own houses, let alone leave the house alone. What makes me guilty is that we often have to make them move so as to enable them to retrieve the food we give them. However, as my friend's father said, "This is already one of the simplest ways to give them food. Imagine they had to all go out to buy their own food!". 

My friend's father has been doing this charity service for around 8 months, and he's taken quite a passion for this charity event. He takes pride in knowing that "this operation that we have takes place 365 days a year, 7 days a week. We supply them with lunch and dinner every day for as long as they are enrolled with us." True enough there are some who have been cancelled off the list we have been assigned to follow. Hopefully they have been cancelled for positive reasons than for the negative reasons that I had in my head at that point in time. 

There are poor people in Singapore and in any society that we live in, no matter how good it looks on paper statistically. What these charities try to do is to try and live up to the assumptions that we see in the statistics by distributing the wealth evenly, and try to create a better future for the poor and old. The strong are to defend the weak, the rich are to help the poor.

Let's make the world a better place to live in!

Cheers,

Matthew Tan