Inspiring Stories

My journey as a volunteer started with something of a shock. Seven years ago, I found myself among the rowdiest students I ever encountered. Their bodies were covered with tattoos and vulgarities punctuated their every utterance.

I had signed up to help out at a four-day camp for at-risk youths organised by CARE Singapore.

The objective was for social workers to bond with the so-called delinquents, so they could better understand the challenges the youths were facing.

As a member of the logistics team, my task was clear: To prepare the game stations and clean up after. But my personal goal was even clearer: Simply clock the hours for my school’s Community Involvement Programme.

All that changed as I watched the facilitators and social workers engage and bond with the youths, who confided in them.

It was heartwarming to see the delinquents bare their souls to their new friends.

WHY DO PEOPLE VOLUNTEER?

It got me thinking: Why do the volunteers come back year after year and put themselves through rounds of physically demanding and emotionally-draining camps?

The answer was simple and rang with sincerity — the students matter to them.

The following year, CARE Singapore asked if I wanted to help out again at the camp. I said yes and went on to volunteer in other areas of social need.

Today, I teach sign language every Saturday and have gone back for numerous CARE camps as a facilitator. I am proud to call myself a volunteer.

I know some people — youths and adults alike — are not as enthusiastic about volunteering because they fear the heavy commitment involved.

The compassion and empathy to help others may have been ignited, but it is often the lack of discipline to commit to a responsibility that causes one to hesitate.

However, who said volunteering has to be a lifelong commitment? There is no contract to sign that would obligate a volunteer to remain with an organisation or cause beyond the duration of that individual’s interest to help.

SMALL STEP TO A BIGGER CHANGE

Perhaps it is the way we have promoted volunteerism that is to be blamed. More often than not, words such as “committed” and “passionate” are used in campaigns to recruit volunteers.

The latter is perfectly fine, as a certain degree of passion and empathy is needed for one to extend a helping hand.

The former, however, implies a prolonged dedication and obligations that some potential volunteers may not be willing to commit to, for personal reasons.

So, perhaps, volunteerism should be presented to first-timers as a small step towards a bigger change. Every contribution, small or big, long- or short-term, will go a long way towards making a difference to the lives of others in need.

Then maybe, a one-off stint will transform into two and many more stints. That was how my own journey began.

It is these initial encounters that provide the key ingredient to sustain a volunteer’s dedication to a cause: The relationships that are forged. These relationships need not only be between the volunteer and the beneficiaries, but even among volunteers themselves.

With our hectic lifestyles, it is always easy to tell ourselves that we are too busy to volunteer. However, there have also been many encouraging examples where people still give back to the community despite their busy lives.

The fact is, volunteering may not always start from an altruistic heart. Those who give their time, money and energy, purely out of a heart of gold, truly deserve our applause.

But for others, such as myself, it started in a very small way. It was a small step taken not even for the most noble of reasons.

But it was a step nonetheless — and it has led to countless more, on a path that has helped me grow in many ways.

Felicia Ee, an intern at the National Volunteer and Philanthropy Centre, is a third-year student at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University.

Source: TODAY

It had been Mr Ravi Rai’s childhood dream to start a foundation for homeless children in India.

Mr Rai, who was born in Singapore, would visit his ancestral home in Pharsar, Uttar Pradesh, as a child with his freedom fighter father Ram Awadh Rai and would be in shock seeing destitute and impoverished children his age living on footpaths and railway platforms in India. There are now about 78 million homeless people in India, despite its growing economic strength.

“As a child, I was deeply affected by their misery and condition. They would be dressed in filthy rags, eat leftover food that people threw away and even do drugs. I decided then that I would do something for them,” Mr Rai, 51, said. So in 1998, after working as an engineer for 13 years in Singapore, the Singaporean headed to India with all of his $300,000 savings to set up the foundation Children Of Mother Earth (COME). He converted his ancestral home in Pharsar into a children’s centre and took in 25 children, providing them with food, shelter, clothing and education.

Today, he has expanded the reach of his foundation by opening four more centres and his five centres now house more than 200 children.

But it is sometimes difficult to get the children to his centre, because they are addicted to drugs and a life of crime, he said.

“They want to run free. Living in a home, studying and caring for others is alien to them. They don’t want to be restricted and don’t understand the value of education,” Mr Rai said.

But his persistence eventually pays off. Sometimes poor parents also leave their children at his centre to keep them off the streets.

Mr Rai relies on the $2,000 rent he receives from his three-room flat in Clementi and donations from well-wishers to keep his foundation running. “When I began, I wanted to do this all on my own, from my own savings and whatever other money I was making through rent. I was headstrong and egotistical. I didn’t want to ask anybody for help,” Mr Rai said.

But reality hit him hard when in no time the funds were depleted and the number of children who needed help overwhelmed him. “I couldn’t set a number on the children I would help. If I saw a homeless, destitute child, I had to take him in. Then at one point I realised I couldn’t do this on my own.

Since then friends and benefactors have helped me greatly with their time and money,” Mr Rai said.

His centres, located in Delhi, Pharsar, Lucknow, Gorakhpur and Kuraunee near Lucknow, not only provide lodging to children but also vocational training, medical help and counselling to more than 500 children who go to the centres but do not live there.

Mr Rai’s family shuttled between India and Singapore during his childhood.

The eight children in the family (three brothers and five sisters) were given the option of pursuing their education in Singapore or India. Mr Rai chose India, the country he fell in love with, with every subsequent visit.

“I did my schooling and then pursued an engineering degree in India, before coming back to Singapore to work,” Mr Rai said, adding that those years spent in India gave him an understanding of the place and how things worked there. His late father, who worked with Indian leader Subhash Chandra Bose, was also a big influence in his life.

“It is not easy to start something new in India. The bureaucracy and the red tape can be stifling,” Mr Rai said. He recalled an incident when he first went to register COME in 1998.

The officer in charge asked him for a bribe of Rs2,000 to do his work but Mr Rai refused. Thus he had to face countless obstacles and ill-treatment.

“But along with the corruption, there are some very kind and good people who helped me in my work,” Mr Rai said. Like Indian Railways Board ex-chairman J.P. Batra, who gave him abandoned railway warehouses in Delhi and Gorakhpur and an unused railway building in Lucknow to open three COME centres.

Mr Rai now lives in India at his home in Pharsar. His efforts were recognised by the UP state government. The chief minister of the state Akhilesh Yadav presented him with an award in appreciation for his humanitarian work. He recently held an exhibition in Singapore to garner support for COME. He aims to expand and open more centres across India to help children in need.

Source: tabla!

To feed his family, retired businessman Tony Tay has sold all kinds of goods and services, from insurance policies to sewing machines and durians, and run a printing firm.

He is no less committed to feeding the 3,000 needy people served by the Willing Hearts charity he runs, for which he received the President’s Award For Volunteerism last month.

Mr Tay, 66, plans to move the charity from its current site in an industrial building in Genting Lane to larger premises in Jalan Ubi, in order to serve 2,000 more meals a day.

The affable man says he spends up to $300 monthly out of his own pocket, for instance, buying appliances such as rice cookers, for the needy whom he meets.

Explaining his motivation as the founder of Willing Hearts, he says: “Everything in life was given to me, why shouldn’t I give back much?”

Willing Hearts began in 2003 with a mission to give bread to migrant workers.

In his terrace home in Balestier where he lives with his wife Mary Ho, 66, donated bottles of cooking oil, sacks of rice and cartons of body wash are tucked into odd corners.

Here, his three married children and nine grandchildren gather for Saturday dinners.

Eldest child Alphonsus, 44, a health- care professional, says the home is like a “community centre, with people coming and going”.

Ms Ho, who used to run her own logistics company when the children were growing up, recalls that in 2005, her husband also took in homeless people from the downtown Catholic parish where they serve for about six months each time.

Their youngest child, events manager Ann, 38, says she and her brothers were initially worried for their parents’ safety.

“I didn’t understand the impact he had on people until seven years ago. A friend, who at first didn’t know he was my father, said what he did was amazing,” says Ann.

Mr Tay’s second child, 43-year-old life coach Aloysius, was absent at the interview.

Mr Tay, how did you teach your children the life lessons you learnt?

Mr Tay: I told them about my childhood and let them do chores.

I learnt to sweep the floor at seven, carry night soil to fertilise the garden at eight and iron clothes at nine. It was a charcoal iron, mind you. If you blew in the wrong direction, the clothes got black.

My father left the family when I was about five. A priest referred my sister and me to the Canossian Sisters’ children’s home where we lived for five years. We saw mum during the holidays.

Alphonsus: By six or seven years old, I could boil eggs and make coffee for breakfast for the family.

Ann: Later, when dad was in the printing business, I remember helping to assemble stacks of pink, yellow, white and green slips of paper into receipt books.

How close were you to your children when they were young?

Ms Ho: My husband and I worked late, and my mother-in-law looked after my children.

Ann: Mummy and daddy spent Saturday afternoons and Sundays with us. We camped at Changi Beach when I was in primary school and took walks along the MacRitchie Trail when I was in my teens.

Alphonsus: He was home most evenings after I was 11 years old, and we went out for walks as a family after dinner.

Mr Tay: We had barbecues at home every weekend till they were in their late teens and had their own friends.

What was the naughtiest thing you did as children?

Alphonsus: My brother and I were always up to mischief. Once, when I was around five or six years old, we took some cigarettes from a neighbour’s house. We crawled under the bed and began striking matches to light the cigarettes. My grandmother smelt the burning and caught us under the bed.

Mr Tay: I used my belt on their bums.

Alphonsus: That was enough for us to learn to stay off cigarettes. Other than that time, they didn’t cane us. They just explained.

Mr Tay: If they were just having fun, like one day when they left their sister in a monsoon drain where they were catching fish, I just explained to them that it was dangerous to do that.

If you punish children after they tell you the reason, they won’t tell you anything.

Mr Tay, why did you quit smoking?

Mr Tay: I used to smoke one carton or 200 sticks a day.

Ms Ho: He was in the insurance business, and smoked and drank with clients.

Alphonsus: I must have been around 11 and he was about 33 when he landed in hospital with heartburn.

Mr Tay: I remember Ah Boy (Alphonsus) asking me a couple of weeks after I returned home from hospital, “Do you want to see me go to university?” I threw away the cigarettes and shook hands with him on that agreement.

Alphonsus: I had cut a deal with daddy – I’d study hard if he’d stop smoking.

What is your relationship with your children like now?

Mr Tay: Everybody comes home for dinner on Saturdays. We want the grandchildren to mingle and for all to bond. The person who can’t make it on that day has a Sunday dinner with us.

What are you like as a grandfather?

Ann: He’s a doting grandfather and loves bonding with the grandkids over meals.

Alphonsus: Even now, mummy and daddy always remember to buy my children’s favourite soaps when they shop at the supermarket.

Mr Tay: My grandchildren kiss my wife and me when they come over and cuddle us when they say goodbye.

How have your father’s deeds inspired you?

Ann: I tagged along when my grandma volunteered at an old folks’ home. She cooked for church members. Daddy continued her legacy.

I volunteer to help with event logistics when the need arises.

Alphonsus: Sometimes, I treat clients first and let them pay later. One needy person returned six years later to pay me his fees.

If the parent-child roles were reversed, what would you do differently?

Alphonsus: Sometimes, I wish daddy would take it easier. I wouldn’t have carried loads of vegetables till I had a bad back.

Ann: If I were daddy, I wouldn’t do anything differently because I’d come home feeling happy knowing the number of people I have helped.

Mr Tay: My children were brought up differently from me, so I wouldn’t know how to reverse the situation.

Source: The Straits Times

Most landlords rent out their flats to make money.

But not Singaporean Ravi Rai Manas, 51.

The $2,000 he collects monthly from his three-room flat in Clementi and donations that he gets help pay for five child shelters in India.

The shelters house 200 homeless, abandoned or impoverished children.

The money is also used for their medical fees, and provides vocational training courses and counselling services for another 400 children who drop by every year but do not live in Mr Rai’s shelters.

“There are moments where you just run out of money,” said Mr Rai, who founded Children Of Mother Earth (Come) in 1998, with his life savings of $300,000, which ran out four years later.

“In those times, I would call my friends in the US and UK for donations, and somehow it will work out in the end,” he said.

He enlists the help of volunteers from India and overseas to conduct classes.

Local doctors and mental health experts also provide their services for free, he said.

Mr Rai spoke to The New Paper at an exhibition at The Foothills in Fort Canning Park to spread awareness of Come’s child shelters.

The free exhibition ends this Sunday.

When Mr Rai was a child, his father, Mr Ram Awadh Rai, would often take the family to their ancestral home in Pharsar, a village on the outskirts of Gorakhpur, in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

There, Mr Rai saw children of his age living in abject poverty.

The sight of children dressed in dirty rags begging for food and money sparked his resolve to help them one day, when he had the means to do so.

That finally happened in 1998, when he quit his civil engineering job of 13 years. He had been earning about $5,000 a month.

He set up the first shelter in Pharsar in 1998, taking in 25 children he found wandering the streets.

Mr Rai, who is single, said: “These kids came from the lower castes of society and never received any form of education.

“Most are orphans, some were abandoned by their parents due to poverty, but almost all of them were criminals of some sort, dealing with drugs and joining gangs.”

But he realised they were only a drop in an ocean of destitute vagrants. He began going to the railway station, where many homeless children choose to live, to spread the word about his shelter.

“They prefer to be outside. These children want the freedom to commit crime, to use drugs,” he said.

Eventually, his efforts were noticed by Mr J. P. Batra, then railway manager of Indian Railways.

Impressed by Mr Rai’s work, Mr Batra allowed him the use of three under-utilised Indian Railways buildings. Mr Rai used those buildings in Lucknow, Delhi and Gorakhpur to house more children. Today, he has about 200 children under his care. Donations and volunteers keep his work alive.

“If you do something meaningful, and with the right intentions, people will come to you offering their help or their money,” Mr Rai said.

The children receive free medical help, basic education and trauma counselling to help them move on with life when they grow up.

Employs 40 people

Mr Rai employs 40 people to help run the shelters and now lives in India to help manage Come’s day-to-day operations.

His younger brother, Mr Shashi Rai, 47, said that Mr Rai’s personal mission has been apparent since they were young.

“He has always been a kind, sensitive man and we all kind of expected it,” said Mr Shashi Rai, who helps his brother run the Singapore chapter of Come. Mr Rai has two brothers and five sisters.

The most important person he had to convince of his plan was his father, who was expecting him to get married.

“So one day I summoned all my courage and told him I didn’t want to get married, that I wanted to do this. He stood up, hugged me tightly and whispered ‘I’m really proud of you’,” said Mr Rai.

“That was a big day for me.”

His father died in 1997 and the ancestral Pharsar house became the first shelter.

For more details, see www.comeinternational.org

Source: The New Paper