I was excited when MWC was invited by the Singapore Police Force to participate in their Project Forward 2014 roadshow earlier in February.

The aim of the roadshow is to educate foreign workers to avoid becoming victims of crime, prepare them for civil emergencies, give them tips on Singapore culture and thus helping with social integration.

Having just joined MWC in early January, my interaction with migrant workers has been pretty minimal - it consisted mainly of attending and aiding distress workers from walk-in cases and via phone calls.

Through the Project Forward roadshow, it dawned onto me that the work I had been doing is just a tiny fragment from a large jigsaw puzzle.

It was also my first time in a dormitory. Having been staying in a comfortable and spacious home in Singapore, the dormitory setting was quite an encounter. It was reminiscent of army camps.

Besides promoting MWC’s services to the foreign workers, interacting with them and gathering sign-ups for our new English course. We were really fortunate to have gotten Constructing Care Collaboration (CCC), a student’s initiative project spearheaded by the NUS medical faculty to join us in this roadshow.

The NUS team provided basic height, weight and blood pressure checks, and also dispensed health tips based on the workers’ current habits. Many of these workers cannot afford the expensive doctor fees in Singapore, so you can expect, the queue for the checks were snakingly long. We had to inform the workers nicely that the roadshow has ended and the students need to rush for another clinic. They can however, make their way to the Community Clinics (part of the CCC’s network of clinics) which charges $5 per consultation session.

Mr Patrick Tay, Guest-of-Honour and MP for Nee Soon, was impressed by MWC’s efforts and it was our honour to have him acknowledging MWC by taking a group photo with the team. Mr Tay even went around and gave appreciative handshakes to the NUS students in recognition for their taking time off to volunteer with us.

Through interaction with the workers, I discovered that some of them are paid quite low for their sustenance in Singapore. What more when they have families depending on them to send money back home for livelihood.

It was then that I realized with their low-income, entertainment activities are extremely limited and the workers do not have many places to go to on their off-days.

We may then attribute this as a possible reason why we see hoards of workers in public spaces, when they are just seen catching up with fellow countrymen by enjoying drinks in public, letting their hair down after a week of hard work and from toiling under treacherous work conditions.

Their off-days are their precious weekends. Like Singaporeans too, they want to be able to fully enjoy and achieve a healthy work life balance.

Part of our objective for the roadshow was to gather workers’ interest of learning spoken English as a form of social integration in Singapore. English, being primarily our first language will be a valuable communication tool for work and social practices for these workers.

The sign-ups for the course was surprisingly forthcoming, despite the fact that most workers only have a day off per week and the course which will be conducted on Sundays, proved that these workers are keen to pick up an entirely new language to enable them to harmonize well within society.

Through Project Forward, I am glad that MWC has extended some form of aid and outreach to workers who maybe feeling home sick, helpless or depressed. I am happy and proud to be part of it.

At one point during the program, I looked up on stage, the emcee was cajoling some workers to join in the Indian dance steps. Some workers rapturously took off their shirts (with their singlets on of course…), obviously elated from the familiar booming music and were dancing as though they were part of a Bollywood cast.

I thought to myself, how nice it would be if Singaporeans can witness all this, to live in the shoes of these foreign workers and be appreciative that these are the hands and abled bodies that built modern Singapore. 

Reported by Senior Specialist Francis Seah