Thoughts on TissueAunty's birthday

It was TissueAunty's birthday today - I broke my promise to celebrate it with her over dinner(she insisted on treating) as I was in a meeting and prioritised that as more "important". I am kinda grateful that I got a second chance on my way home. Apparently after her birthday dinner, she went straight back to the little Bugis island, selling her tissue paper. She insisted on treating me to a drink and I sat with her for a while to make up for missing her birthday. Teasing her about her new haircut, I asked her what she wanted as a present. In an embarrassed whisper, she requested for a Singtel Hi Card and perhaps a little pushcart trolley to ferry her multiple bags of tissuepaper, knickknacks and all that she peddled. She also asked for prayer for her and her family.

I thought it was sweet of her to actually want to buy me birthday dinner. And sweeter still that her requests were so simple and asked for with so little bile or greed. She has so little and yet she wants to cheerfully share her wealth still. Since meeting her and being challenged by God on a personal level to be more participative in the life of the needy, I must say she has taught me some things about faith and perseverance in terrible circumstances. She has also shown me that God truly looks after the weakest and neediest in profound ways when we people neglect them. (Update: She found a flat that costs significantly less to rent and an easier-going $1200/month job manning a toilet at Bugis Village! Her son also secured a jib pushing a drink cart near Rochor. That's amazing considering her circumstances when we first met)

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This made me muse a bit about something. On my DISC profile, with my high S and I, I am classified as a Counsellor/Adviser. It seems to tally with my experiences with random strangers. I am an uncanny magnet for strangers with the oddest hard luck stories on the streets. I think I send out a broadband signal - "easy target. will listen. likes oddballs. please approach. will find it hard to say no to request for conversation."

Everytime I meet a stranger with a hardluck story, I am challenged to put my beliefs about helping the poor to the test. I am fairly absolute in my statements to my students about the need to challenge the status quo and bridging the rich/ poor divide at an individual level as well as societal and international level. With each strange 'kook', I meet I am forced to readdress my values, "Are you gonna help or are you gonna walk away?"

It's really really tough and I can feel how easy it is to walk away. It is a temptation to help out in as fast, simple, "in and out" way as possible. Far tougher to make the decision to commit long-term to helping another person. It already is tough to dig out the wallet and dispense out the cash to a needy person. It is far far far tougher to go an extra mile and say you are willing to be involved beyond the chance encounter.

I know all the routine arguments because heaven knows, I have made them before in my lifetime ---- Yes, it is impossible to be involved personally with every single poor person that we meet, yes we can never insure that the money we give does not go to ciggies-drugs-alcohol, yes we are too culturally different to be of real use to them, Yes, I know we can just buy them food because that's what they need most.....so far the nagging feeling that will not leave my mind anytime I hear these arguments is - are those answers tripping just a little too quickly and conveniently off my tongue? Do my clever words disguise mere excuses? Do I want to buy food because I dont want to commit to giving real money and time to find out where exactly the person needs help in?

$5 for a pack of chicken rice is a cheap price to pay for assuaging guilty naggy feelings of "you ought to help the poor" and gaining the high of"wow,i am a generous person." We buy the drink and food for the homeless, feel warm inside with the chance to play benefactor and walk away from them for the rest of our life. We go back to our riches, they go back to an everyday reality of poverty. I just don't buy short-term charity. Real charitable work is a life-time commitment- a hard core decision to invest one's life in another's life. Cursory donations are useful but just don't cut it in terms of long-term solutions.

It's a challenge - and one that I am still wondering how I will fare in in my maiden effort/experiment with TissueAunty. Its tough...there have been so many encounters that I had where I was not sure how to go on further.

One time after working late at school, I was accousted by a drugged out looking chinese man asking for ten bucks. Not wanting to antagonise him, I listened politely to his ravings for a good thirty minutes - the conversation went from how his family betrayed him, to how he jumped off a building once and hurt his 'lum-par' (he gestured at his crotch violently to emphasise his point) but not one of his family looked after him, While talking to me, he would creepily talk at a space behind me, as if there was someone behind me. The nuttiest part was when he declared he had gone to prison before and was angry all the time and wanted to kill people. He stressed that sometimes he wondered if people walking on the street knew that he wanted to kill them. (At this point, I said, 'Oh no, I don't think they do and you should not kill people') He agreed and mentioned that in prison he met a Malay man who was always patient even though he insulted Malay guy's mom ('I call her C-B also he never angry!') From then, he wanted to be just like the guy. I nodded very very approvingly ('ya its good, learn to be like him'), gave him money and walked off as soon as it seemed like he was content he got stuff off his chest and was not gonna kill me.

Then there was the Eurasian man with one of those annoying survey forms who approached me in Raffles MRT, asking me questions about whether I liked my job and whether I was keen on switching careers to the sales company he was surveying for. I was trying to explain to him how I loved teaching and would never consider a career switch - he could not understand at all why anyone would not even try to find out how to get extra income. Conversation became a philosophical one about the nature of work and money with him trying to convince me about his stance - anyhow, turned out he was a slightly mentally unhinged unemployed man, sacked from his management post, and not taking it too well. He was a philosophy major and repeatedly made sure I understood that. Conversation lasted an hour. Anyhow, a few months later, I meet the same guy, doing the same survey at Bugis MRT. When he approaches me, I tell him straight away that he asked me before and we had a really long talk about why I was not keen. He goes on to reveal to me that he is angry the PAP wont subsidise his brain surgery and the government should watch out for how all the unemployed - "the walking dead" he called them - would rise up and overthrow it. He also names for me all the nasty civil servants he met at the CDC distributing social welfare. He also reiterates for me that he is not stupid, he came from a prestigious school and it was not his fault he was like that. (He spoke quite poshily actually, good enunciation)

And the most recent encounter: A woman with long greying hair, watery eyes and a mouth full of the smelliest, broken up , blackened teeth I had ever seen came up to me and claimed she had been praying for God to send her someone to help her pay her rent. The smell from her mouth was the foulest thing ever - she kept covering her mouth and apologising, saying she had cancer. She explains to me how her husband had died, and she was broke, and several times in conversation, she breaks off to pray one-liners to God. During entire conversation, she keeps reaching out to touch me on my hand and my stomach/waist when she wanted to emphasise "I am not a cheat. I got cheated before by a friend, I know what it is to be cheated. Please dont think I am one." We arranged to meet at City Hall the next day so I could give her some cash. She kept asking me to pray for her and how important it was because she had more vital spiritual needs than the material ones.
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I wondered in every one of those cases, how could I offer long term commitment to help? When do I hand over the responsibilities to other people? It's a really tough call to follow. Need so much grace for it to happen! Still exploring....:)