CATCH: the humanitarian project

I Fight, For Them

27-year-old former journalist Mr Gautam Joseph now spends his days as a social worker and volunteering at the Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2) organisation. He and others are fighting for the rights of the migrants living in Singapore, though it’s not the easiest task.

By: Jade Teo

If things were easy, they wouldn’t be worth doing.

But it’s like taking up cycling, you just got to get out there and do it, said Mr Gautam Joseph, a social worker and regular volunteer at the non-profit, Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2).

TWC2 assists migrant workers who come into Singapore on a work permit. Most get jobs as domestic workers, or do labour in construction sites and factories. But because they’re so ill equipped when they arrive, such as being unfamiliar with local laws, plus paying hefty agent fees, a lot have to mortgage their homes or land.

Some are even heavy in debt for years.

The NGO does their best to help these workers deal with problems such as salary issues or work place injury claims.

They even have a meal programme situated at Little India called the Cuff Road Project, which helps more than 200 migrants daily. A few even ask to be put up in their day-space, above Isthana Restaurant, till they’re back on their feet.

“It’s our first point of contact with them,” the 27-year-old said.

“Sometimes I feel I travel further than any backpacker, sitting at those tables outside (the restaurant), handing out the meal coupons, and listening in on stories.”

With these people stuck in a similar “limbo”, Mr Joseph’s work is never done. He and the other volunteers are at this as many times as they can spare the time to. He would go in three to four times a week.

“There are many worthy causes, and I think it’s mostly about what suits you,” he said.

Of course, spending as much time as he does with certain clients makes it difficult not to get emotional.

Mr Joseph had recounted how he felt some of the lowest points in his life were when he has to turn away someone “who clearly deserves your help”.

He told CATCH that in the labour court, occasionally they see the witnesses to work accidents refusing to testify because the boss- es have the power to terminate latter’s work permit and send them back home.

So you see the injured person, he added, you know how badly the injury will affect their future livelihood and you know from the nature of the injury that it’s hard they got it from anywhere outside the workplace, yet there’s no admissible evidence in court.

He explained, “It is not far different in the hospital, when you first give a patient hope that there might be a treatment for a fatal or handicapping illness, but in the end the employer, or insurer is unable to cover the costs, and they have to be sent back without treatment.”

So why volunteer here and not some other organisation?

Mr Joseph poignantly said:

“It’s one more way to fight for things I care about, things that I want to see changed, but to which there might not be an immediate or paid solution.”

They Changed My Life, so I’ll Change Theirs

It’s been 18 years since Ms Sherlyn Khong begun helping out at Payatas, the biggest dumpsite in the Philippines. Yet one thing that hasn’t changed is the want to educate the community’s children, something even we can do.

By: Jade Teo

Just about anyone can volunteer to aid the less fortunate, but would they be willing to for 18 years?

She’s been motivated to help them since her first trip to the Philippines when she was 22 and even founded a non-profit organisation (NGO) called acts29. Since then, Ms Sherlyn Khong and other volunteers continue to travel to Payatas, the country’s biggest open dumpsite, to aid the community living around it.

“Education is the main aim because that’s the most important thing,” said the part-time tutor, who also doles out scholarships to children through her NGO. “It’s not about ‘studying for the sake of studying’, but they study for a purpose.”

Their projects such as Dream Beyond, which are field trips that let the people and children to see beyond Payatas, help in their cause. Even though she graduated with an IT diploma from Nanyang Polytechnic, Ms Khong commented how she felt education would make the most difference.

She mentioned she has even used what she learned to teach the children, like training them on Microsoft and getting them to use YouTube. Though she half- joked she wished the Internet speed would be a lot faster sometime soon.

She told CATCH: “I think there are so many ways to help… So we’re very happy when people, students come over to teach.”

Nothing is too difficult unless we perceive it to be, and same can be said of reaching out to the people in the community. For Ms Khong, she takes on a very hands-on approach and if the people are preparing for college, she would set some time aside to prepare them with English essay writing.

It’s something especially those living in developed countries, like Singapore, can help with too. She explained how, for those who can’t travel or they’re in school, there’s always the option of making videos or lesson plans.

But according to her, there isn’t enough content material or subjects being taught in the schools to prepare them for university, so “the whole village is now struggling” to learn the basic subjects, such as trigonometry.

She observed: “It’s also a skill set of the volunteers that are coming. If we have a geography teacher, she teaches geography; if we have someone who cooks or is a cook, then perhaps work with the families, (with) the parents, to teach them nutritious dishes.”

Ms Khong is a strong believer in the benefits that education can bring, especially to people who can’t afford to go to school.

After all, this community lives around a dumpsite 12 to 13 storeys high of trash, which is about three-years’ worth of rubbish collected from metro Manila. That’s about five cities.

“Just imagine Ang Mo Kio, and instead of having Ang Mo Kio Central, it’s a mountain of rubbish,” she described.

The people who live here are mainly squatters, she said, and they live in makeshift houses in-between houses. The people build them with anything they find, from cardboard to galvanised sheets or wood, and they go as high as two-storeys.

“…so in a squatter’s it’s also that one-room home. It could be 10-20 square metres, about that size, of the kitchen, dining and sleeping area,” she recounted.

“With a lot of the kids we work with, they don’t necessarily differentiate what’s trash and what’s not trash, because everything has value.”

It’s the parents who usually work as scavengers for 12-hour shifts at the dumpsite, so they gather five to eight gunnysacks and go down to the junk shops to collect their payment.

Unfortunately “at the end of the day, this scavenger could be taking home less than 100 pesos, that would be S$3 or less”, so it’s barely enough to survive considering the average family size is about six.

“So it helps them that everyone works, so if everyone’s working there’s more money. But that means that the kids drop out of school at 10,” said Ms Khong. “So (acts29)’s work there is to really work with the scavenging families, support (them) and make sure their 10- and 11-year-olds stay on and go to school, so that can be another challenge. When children work alongside their parents, they see their parents working, or the environment is such that they see everyone else is working, they don’t see the point in studying.”

She believes the children feel that it’s their moral obligation and they can’t see that far into their future. She remarked how they are planning for today or the next day􏰀 and don’t see that when you graduate at 24-years-old, they would be earning more, enough to buy a proper house for their parents.

And although many think this way, there are some children who know they have a future if they study. One of Ms Khong’s most touching moments was many years ago, when she met Julian Donaire, who was 17 or 18 at the time.

The scholars and kids from the street come in to read at the activity centre.

She told CATCH:

She said, “(He) shared with me his story􏰁 his parents had abandoned him and “

he was left with his grandmother. Then they moved to the dumpsite to stay. (And) at 10-years-old his grandma passed away, so he’s all alone.”

Julian had made his own squatter home, a very small room for him􏰀 and he worked at the dumpsite to support himself. He promised himself that he would get an education, so he went to the School for Humanity. This is a non-formal school providing alternative learning for out-of-school kids and teens.

Since 10 till when she met him, he’s been going to that school to learn to read and write. He eventually qualified for Maritime Engineering and he graduated. Today he’s in his 30s and has a beautiful family, and they’re still living in Payatas.

All their projects and initiatives are for people like Julian to “see there are options and there are choices”.

She said:

“And even for the volunteers, we live in this urban jungle – it’s also for us to go out and ‘dream beyond’ something for ourselves. At the end of the day, it’s for all the people (acts29) worked with, to find their purpose and meaning in life.”

Lebanon has been unlucky since the 70s, being in the middle of civil wars and conflicts all its life. But there was a time before that when it was a prosperous cosmopolitan, so CATCH brings you the other side of the country, with its food and fashion. Showing there’s always so much more to a place than what’s seen from the outside.

By: Jade Teo

Tiny Lebanon baffles outsiders.

Lebanon, with its high merchant culture, was traditionally seen as an important commercial hub for the Middle East. Unfortunately it has also been at the centre of the Middle Eastern conflicts; also due to the fact that it shares borders with Syria and Israel.

Lebanon was set up by France in World War I as a predominantly Christian state. From 1975 till the early 1990s, it endured a civil war where regional players – particularly Israel, Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organisation – used the country as a battleground for their own conflicts.

Though Israeli troops invaded twice, Syrian troops moved in shortly after the war started to stay and exert political clout in Lebanon, even after withdrawing in 2005.

The withdrawal followed the assassination in Beirut of former prime minister Rafik Hariri. Lebanese opposition accused Syria over the killing and the giant pro- and anti-Syria rallies triggered the fall of the government.

The pullout ended a 29-year military presence.

In February last year, the United Nations announced that the number of Syrian refugees registered in Lebanon surpassed one million. The figure made it all the more astonishing by the fact that Lebanon had fewer than six million people to begin with.

But in January, there were new restrictions on Syrians entering the country, which further slowed the flow of people trying to escape war. The Lebanese government clearly does not allow the refugees to settle in large scale camps, perhaps because when it built similar camps for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, they became permanent settlements.

That means that Syrians must build temporary shelter where they can – on pieces of waste ground in the town centre, or in fields in the countryside.

around the world in 2 minutes

Short bites on stories and affairs going on around the world in relation to the theme of ‘humanity’.

01

Inside the Indian village…

…where a mob killed a man for eating beef.

Mohammed Akhlaq, a 50-year-old labourer, was beaten to death by a mob in his small two-storey home in the centre of Bishara village, about an hour’s drive from Delhi. He and his son were dragged from their beds and beaten with bricks. The father died; the son is fighting for his life in hospital.

The mob that killed him believed Akhlaq and his family, who are Muslim, had eaten meat from a cow, an animal considered sacred by most of the Indian population.

On the weekend of Sep 27, the remains of a calf were found outside Bishara. On Mon- day (Sep 28) night someone used the village temple’s loudspeakers to broadcast the allegation. “All the labourers around here are Muslims. We have no land,” said Hanif, a brother of the dead man and a labourer.

“Mohammed was a quiet man. Like most of us, he just worked and kept quiet.” The Guardian

A bruised Asgari Begum, mother of Muslim farmer Mohammed Akhlaq, who was killed by a Hindu mob, stands by the entrance of her home on .

Photograph: Manish Swarup/AP

02

They’re safe

Turkish construction workers are now free after being held hostage in Iraq last month. They were asleep at a construction site when armed men arrived at about 6am.

An unknown militant group claimed the kidnappings in a video posted online earlier in September and issued a list of demands it said Ankara must fulfil for them to be freed. Davutoglu thanked “Iraqi friends” who had worked toward the men’s release, without elaborating. “Thankfully, they are in good health,” Turkish PM Davutoglu stated.

“(The remaining) sixteen of the earlier (18) kidnapped Turkish workers are now in our embassy in Baghdad.”

Two videos showing the Turkish workers were released after their abduction/AP

03

Christina Aguilera goes on a trip

Singer Christina Aguilera connected with her family’s history on a humanitarian trip in Ecuador. The 34-year-old is a volunteer global spokesperson for Yum! Brands’ World Hunger Relief visited the South American nation to help hungry children, as part of the company’s efforts. “…I went into the fields and got to meet the women and children there who are really trying to survive,” she said.

04

Milton Veteran honoured with humanitarian award

Fred Smith overcame his own ‘dark times’ – including post-traumatic stress disorder and suicidal tendencies – and the Miltonian has been a lifeline to numerous veterans struggling with their demons. His tireless work with Veterans Helping Veterans was recognised in October with the Liz Hoffman Memorial Commendation, which goes to those making extra effort in helping bring about positive change to the Department of National Defence and Canadian Forces. “To be recognised in this way is pretty cool. Once I finally got help, I saw there was a pile of others in need and I couldn’t let that go,” said Smith.