A Different Community

(image from theonlinecitizen)

Despite having done 4 door-to-door visits and collected more than 10 contacts, most of our contacts were busy and were unable to make it for an in-depth interview. In view of this, we decided to look into the homeless as a community that we could possibly reach out to. We first sent out emails to various organisations that provide assistance for the homeless, but to no avail. Eventually, we reached out to a friend who does regular visits with the Catholic Welfare Services, which they kindly allowed us to join them for a session to understand more about the homeless situation in Singapore.

Some of the help rendered to this community includes packing food for the homeless, and attempting to alleviate their problems through means like linking them up with the social workers from the small conversations held, which helped to understand their situation. From our visit, we met approximately 30 people and as it was rather late at night, we just placed the food next to those who were already asleep.

The session was extremely enriching for us as we saw the homeless smiling happily and striking conversations with the volunteers despite facing many problems. We soon realise that this was a result of months of effort, where some people took 4 to 6 months to open up to the volunteers, after noting their genuinity. This showed us the importance of building rapport with the community in order for them to open up and to understand how to better provide assistance to them. However, due to time constraints that we have for our project, we have to explore ways that we can build rapport with the community within a short period of time so that they would open up to us as well. From a past experience shared by one of the volunteers, we also learnt that it is also important to understand from their perspectives in terms of their own needs rather than just relying on our own assumptions on what we think they need, as this might bring about greater inconvenience or disruption to their lives instead.

Before this visit, we had an impression that the homeless are unable to afford a house in Singapore due to unemployment. However, we learnt that most of them are working and it is other reasons that rendered them to be homeless. Some of the reasons include saving up on housing fees for daily necessities and other social problems such as family violence, outcast due to mental health issues and divorce. What struck us most was realising that the public do pass by the areas they sleep at even at midnight, and some even seek refuge at McDonald’s outlets that operate 24 hours. While on one hand it might seem as though the homeless is a marginalised community that is hidden in the dark and disappear in the day, there could possibly be a significant number of people in Singapore who know of their existence, but chose to turn a blind eye to it. This could be a result of negative perceptions attached to the homeless, where some people even steal from them, talk bad about them or throw things at them.

We often think that our capacity as an individual is limited but we realise that the small amount of effort and time put in by these volunteers consistently actually do make a difference to somebody’s life. The session leads us to wonder what more we can do for these people, should we eventually choose to interview them.

The question here is then, how appropriate is it to put them in the public eye just to raise awareness for this group of people?

#doortodoorinterviews #organizations #homeless