A Different Perspective

To gather more participants, our group headed down to Serangoon afternoon and did our third round of door-to-door interviews, where we managed to conduct two in-depth interviews on the spot. The residents are generally friendly and willing to have a simple chat with us, which helped us to understand more about the situation around the estates. This estate is one of the newer rental flat in the area. There is a lot more interaction among the neighbours and we witnessed volunteers giving food to some of the residents.

Learning from Ms Lin

Ms Lin was very welcoming when we first knocked onto her door. With a wide smile, she invited us into her house before we managed to fully describe to her what our project is about. During the interview, we found out that Ms Lin is actually a volunteer and she helps to distribute food rations to different households around her estate during the weekends. Unfortunately, throughout the interview, we realized that we were unable to use the interview as Ms Lin has actually moved on from her difficulty phase. However, knowing that she is volunteering to help the low income individuals, we decided to take this opportunity to understand more from her perspective as a volunteer.

Ms Lin mentioned that during the most difficult phase of her life, she received many support and assistance from different organisations. Therefore, she wanted to give back to the community by helping out individuals who are currently facing difficulties. However, as a volunteer, she said that the assistance they can provide are limited. As a volunteer, she felt that it is hard to find out who needs help when individuals do not approach or seek out for help themselves.

“How will we know that you need help when you don’t visit the organisation to ask for help.”

With thousands of households, it is also difficult for volunteers to visit every single estates and go door to door, asking the residents if they needed any assistance.

Even though Ms Lin has made it past the difficult phase of her life, we are still able to gather interesting insights from her sharing. This allowed us to not only to understand from the perspective of an individual staying in a rental flat, but also enabled us to gather a different viewpoint from her role as a volunteer.

Findings from Ms Laura (P4)

Ms Laura greeted us with wariness and reluctance when we first knocked her door and requested for an interview. Although she agreed to take part in our interview, she was initially very reserved and cautious of what she said when answering our questions. On certain occasions, she even tried to change the topic when we touched on sensitive matters. However, as we tried to break the ice with her along the way, she gradually opened up to us. Seizing the opportunity, we directed the conversation back to several sensitive topics that she was unwilling to delve deeper.

Through our conversation, we managed to gain interesting insights from Ms Laura’s life story. According to Ms Laura, she did not have a normal childhood like most, as she grew up in an adopted family. Despite having a cordial relationship with her adopted family, she did not develop an intimate relationship with them while growing up. In her perspective, her life gradually improved and became stable when she got married at her early twenties, living with her husband and four children in a 4-room HDB flat. Just when she thought that her life was going smooth sailing, it took a turn on her when her husband became a drug addict and consistently went in and out of jail. Eventually, she divorced her husband and was forced to sell the house. Homeless with four kids, she begged the government for a shelter, but was only granted a rental flat after two and a half years. During that period, as a single mother, she had to work day and night to provide for her four kids, leaving her only a couple of hours to sleep almost on a daily basis. Through her hardship, she has managed to raise her all her kids well today, with the oldest married, the second and third working, and the youngest currently still schooling. As of now, although she has existing housing debts, she is gradually recovering from her financial difficulties through monthly incomes from herself and her two working kids.

From her interview, we learnt from the perspective of a mother who faced multiple stresses throughout her life, and the struggles that she had to overcome raising up four children on her own, as well as the stereotypes that she had to face. She showed us the strength that a mother will have when she only thinks about her children despite all the difficulties that she had to face.

*name has been modified for anonymity purposes

#stories #takeaway