On the 12th of July, Doveswarm volunteered in the organisation and execution of two different Hari Raya events at the Jamiyah Children’s Home and Nursing Home. I participated in the festivities in the former, where I and four other volunteers from CA helped to interact with the children at the home as well as 25 migrant construction workers who were also at the event to help with tree-planting and general landscaping of the home. We also got to volunteer alongside the migrant workers for the landscaping efforts.

Photo Courtesy: Sean Lim

Photo Courtesy: Sean Lim

The event as a whole was a very enlightening experience for me for many reasons. Besides the interaction with the children which in my opinion would have made for a rather, run-of-the-mill volunteering experience, what I found the most beneficial and memorable to me as an advocate were the abundant opportunities I had interacting and volunteering at the home with the migrant workers.

In accordance with Doveswarm’s aims of advocating for the inclusiveness of migrant workers in our society, I felt that the event really showed me just how seamlessly migrant workers can integrate into our society and how we as citizens should feel grateful for what they are doing for our society, and in turn be motivated to give back to them by treating them with respect and inclusivity. I had the opportunity of planting a tree with a migrant worker, and despite the rather simplistic nature of the task, the experience of chatting light-heartedly with the worker and working together with him to plant the tree made me feel a sort of bond with him, as if all of the barriers between us, such as the labelling of him as a ‘migrant worker’ or our starkly different backgrounds, had been eliminated. It really struck me and gave me my first learning point, that we as locals can actually work together harmoniously with migrant workers and that all our preconceived perceptions of any divides between us are actually rather arbitrary and trivial. We can and should make the effort to get to know migrant workers and work to include them in our society.

The second learning point which I gained from the event was that we should not just be tolerant or accepting of migrant workers, but also pro-actively seek out channels to give them aid, especially since they presently do so much for the progress and development of our society. During the dinner at the children’s home, I was honoured to have been invited to sit at the VIP table, where I got to interact with a migrant worker on a more personal level, and asked him many questions about his home country and his general experiences working in Singapore. What the migrant worker told me really surprised me as he revealed that he had been in Singapore for the past 15 years, and even convinced his family to move to Singapore where his children currently receive their formal education. He told me that his goal was to raise his children and family well so that they could give back to our society which has already ‘given him so much’. I was incredibly moved by this which incited me to contemplate about what our society could do in return for migrant workers. Despite Singapore not actually being their home country, many migrant workers feel an obligation and are very passionate in serving and contributing to the growth of our society, which prompts the question: if migrant workers are so keen on helping us in a society which they were not brought up in, why aren’t we helping them in return? From this interaction with the worker, whose name I unfortunately could not recall, I learnt that as an advocate and simply a Singaporean citizen, it should be my duty to pro-actively seek out channels to aid every member of our society, especially migrant workers who have already made immeasurable sacrifices to serve the people of our country.

Photo Courtesy: Sean Lim