I always seem to want to blog just before I go to bed. A flurry of thoughts always come to my mind, and after a day, they become all lost.

I never liked community service at first. Service in Secondary 1 was awkward, really awkward. I mean, for stuff like newspaper collections it was fine, but when it came to visits to homes... I could barely say a few sentences while my seniors constantly prodded me to interact. I just didn't know what to say. It was difficult for an introvert to suddenly just interact with strangers you might never meet again.

I guess I really started enjoying home visits in sec 3 or 4. I remember having to teach elderly how to do first aid or sth. I was in charge of a small group, and after a while I was teaching this old lady and we started conversing, me clumsily with my lousy Mandarin. And I realised I didn't have to do much of the speaking. These people didn't need to learn lifeskills; they probably know so much more than secondary school kids... What they needed was a pair of listening ears.

I always feel a little sad when this incident crosses my mind. She told me about how she ended up at the home, waiting for her sister to come get her out "after earning enough money", and how she hasn't seen family in like 20 years (and probably never will ever again).

There are some many people like her in Singapore, and so many in worse plights, and too many of us don't see this. Our government really hides poverty well, with HDB flats everywhere, and possibly one of the few (or only) country in the world without a slum. Is that why the campaign to get youth into the "spirit of volunteerism" failing?

When I was young, my family used to donate during those charity tv shows. Then the NKF and Ren Ci scandal came along and it really shook our belief that we were helping those people. And too many students (including me sometimes) think of CIP hours as just another way of bolstering your CV.

Something's really broken in the system. Something that has to be fixed soon.