Our company went to TSW for a half day of community work, to visit families of TSW to get a better sense of their community. We originally want to go do "meaningful things", like teaching English, etc. But the Community Center said we got it totally wrong! They dont need some random people to come in and teach English for a day. If we walked away with a better understanding of the community, that's mission accomplished from their point of view already. A few soundbites:
"There's more carparks than needed...when the community is being planned out, they thought it's for middle class, with lots of people driving"
"There are bridges everywhere...since buildings are all separated by roads...it was a city designed for middle class who will drive to get around...so bridges are built to make it easier for cars to get around...not for people to walk around town"
Everyone is prepared and has a handkerchief. Since there's a lot of walking around town...and one'd sweat a lot in the big summer heat.
"There's not enough facilities...there's no libraries, hospitals..."
Everyone is really up to speed on everything. From how much vegetable costs in each wet market (down to the dollar)...to what tragedies happen in which estate. When there's so many families (often single moms) not full-time employed, there's a lot of free time - literally the whole day. And with that, word of mouth gets around amazingly fast - for better or for worse. Everything gets amplified infinitely.
The frustration is that it's clearly the government's problem. From urban planning, concentration of single parents with very young kids preventing them from going to work, to high transport fare, etc.
The scariest thing is that the community workers said the government might just wait for the area to "grow out of its problem" literally. It happened to Tung Mun before. Same issues, young kids at home make (sometimes single) parents homebound and cannot really both go to work. But it became not an issue after 10 years - when the kids grow up to be teenagers so that their parents can go out to work again. So, is TSW on the same track to "solve the problem by itself"?
1 comment:
True. The whole point of community service is to benefit the needed, but not to give yourself a sense that you have achieved something rather 'meaningful'.
If you do have the heart to serve/help the less fortunate, you don't do it once in a while, but instead you do it regularly. Only at such an occasion you won't be treated as one of the random people.
A good attempt tho.
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