Skip to main content

Willing Hearts Reflections

I wasn’t entirely sure what was going to happen for our field trip. It just seemed to be a rather exciting prospect, hopefully something new and different. After all, the last field trip I had gone for was during JC which was 3 years ago. What did happen though, was an extremely eye opening experience, which exposed me to something I never thought would exist in Singapore.

 During the brief that Prof Mohan gave on the bus ride there, I imagined that Willing Hearts had a building of its own and would be rather prominent, because after all, it was a soup kitchen of sorts and they would definitely need all that space and facilities to house their operations right? I was rather surprised when we turned into an ulu industrial building which looked rather old and empty, except for the few people at the loading bay and the packets and packets of food, which at that moment seemed to have appeared out of nowhere as the building looked rather dead.

 Imagine the surprise I felt when we took the lift up to the fourth floor, turned a corner, and came upon this bustling base of operations which was crowded with people busy running around, moving packets of food, wrapping things, passing a packet from one person to another. Upon entering Willing Hearts, I noticed that there were a large variety of people there, ranging from young children to mature adults. At the food preparation tables, they stood side by side peeling vegetables, chopping ingredients, cooking rice, it just didn’t matter who they were, everyone was there for the common purpose of giving some of their time to help out the less fortunate.

 After the short tour of Willing Hearts, we proceeded to pack all the packets we were to deliver into our mini-bus, and went off to deliver the food to the beneficiaries. It definitely shocked me that so many people were food insecure in Singapore. Despite their situation, they still thanked us profusely for delivering food to them, even though the food was late, and they probably had been waiting at their void decks for a long time. I had been to similar estates before to do CIP work in school, and while I understood that there were many who were in financial difficulty, I did not imagine that for some it was so bad they couldn’t even afford to feed themselves, something I definitely took for granted in Singapore.

 It struck me how many of us live in our own isolated bubbles, away from other segments of society which might live in completely different realities from us, even though we might share the same geographical area. I strongly feel that more must be done to raise this issue to the public eye, because after all how can a problem be solved if it isn’t even deemed to exist?

 Sufyan

Popular posts from this blog

Zionist hate mongering, the race/terror trope, and the Free Speech Union: Part 1

March 15, 2019. It was a day of terror. Unleashed by a white supremacist far-right terrorist. Driven by hate for brown people. Driven by Islamophobic hate. Earlier in the day, I had come across a hate-based hit piece targeting me, alongside other academics, the University of Auckland academic Professor Nicholas Rowe , Professor Richard Jackson at Otago University, Professor Kevin P Clements at Otago University, Dr. Rose Martin from University of Auckland and Dr. Nigel Parsons at Massey University.  Titled, "More extremists in New Zealand Universities," the article threw in the labels "terror sympathisers" and "extremist views." Written by one David Cumin and hosted on the website of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the article sought to create outrage that academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid are actually employed by universities in New Zealand. Figure 1: The web post written by David Cumin on the site of Israel Institute

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit

Tova O’Brien and pedagogy of whiteness

So Tova O’Brien was looking for a click-bait opportunity to draw in listeners to her podcast and she found the migrant activist and Green Party politician Dr. Sapna Samant to pick on. In a gotcha moment, Tova shared with the Green Party co-leader James Shaw a series of posts made by Dr. Samant on whiteness, Hindutva, and multiculturalism, asking him if the tweets were OK. We don’t understand from listening to O’Brien’s podcast if her research team actively researched Dr. Sapna Samant’s social media posts, or whether these selective screen captures of Dr. Samant’s tweets were sent to her by someone wanting to target Samant. The thoroughly unresearched piece is poor journalism, reflective of the mediocrity that is perpetuated by whiteness , the hegemonic values of the dominant white culture in settler colonies. If indeed her research team had discovered the tweets, it’s worth interrogating why the social media posts of a migrant woman activist on whiteness are of interest to O’Brien’s po