A West Timor Dedication

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Shuxiang

Before the trip, I began the trip to West Timor alone with personal goals and own objective to achieve. But during theses 2 short weeks, having been through good and bad times with the group, I believed all of us have ended the trip with 15 other friends.

Friends who share the same passion and share the same feel about voluntary work. This I feel, is one of the hardest to find in nowadays Singaporeans. Teenagers don't feel for such things anymore, they only have play, money, more play and more money.

Especially in this fast paced era, when u are expendable, u are redundant. This goes out to Mona, Adrian and Kellyn who all leaved all their work and headed for the Timor trip. Doing it and talking it is a big difference and you all shown that difference.

There we were each and single one of us, with 15 different mindsets and family background, race and religion forming team seedling fission.

Although we didn't make any remarkable changes to the lives there, by teaching whatever English knowledge we have, I believe we have set in motion a good cycle which maybe reinforced by our next visit. For them to start interacting with English and practically open a window to the world. The earlier they start the lesser to catch up. Start late and you're forever trying to keep up. Never in pole position and when you make a mistake, u become obsolete and slowly you are forgotten by the world. Left behind by society and trapped there.

Small effort by us, big difference to them.

Hopefully, they will all carry on learning English, keeping the will to learn and make it out of the poverty trap.

So hard for the young not to succumb into the claws of poverty, you can't really tell if there's the passion within them, they are too young to know the poverty cycle, how to break out of it, and the importance of studying.

You can only constantly try to teach and educate and hopefully they dun get influenced by bad distractions and step out of control.

What can u you do to stop this bad influence? Nothing, practically nothing.

The adults are practicing it, the parents are practicing it, the officials are practicing it and the gahmen are also practicing it.

So easy to go wrong, so hard to stay straight.

SF is growing @ 1:15 PM