When I know that I had existed in this world, poverty had not visited me and I don’t even recognize it. It was until when my father had a very serious accident which resulted in the amputation of his left leg. That year, I was just 11 year old, trying to get through my education at primary five.
All of a sudden, visits to the Singapore General Hospital were frequent, just to see my Dad lying on the bed of the ward, groaning initially and later in recuperation. Memories in the ward included busy nurses and doctors, prevented from visitation during non visiting hours and the medical smell of antiseptic solution “dettol” used as a cleaning agent.
As life continues on, I could not understand and comprehend my mother’s emotional state, concerns and worries. At times, I did not understand why she would cry more easily and often.
The only different I noticed was the changes in the dishes for our meals. The dishes started to get lesser and simpler. Simply porridge with peanuts and soya source as dressing served as very common lunches or dinners thereafter.
When I followed my mum to the market, she would always buy the leftover vegetables which were drastically cheaper but needed to slice away the rotten parts for consumption. Meat, fishes and chickens were luxuries reserved for ancestral worship before we could partake.
Poverty then started to sink into my young mind. All my past fond memories of Dad’s returning home late from work with a packet of noodles and enjoying happily with my parents and my sisters had never repeated since then.
To save expenses on fuel, my sisters and I spent our spare times collecting leftover woods from a timber factory down the road. The fire that cooked our meals from these woods made our kettle, pots and pans darkened with soot to the rim. Although it may looked very pathetic at times, nevertheless, it provided us some good and warm meals.
Next action of filling our stomach was to get as many clean newspapers as possible to make into paper bags for barter trade with the provision shops. The owners of these shops would reward us with a few kilograms of flour. With flour, we could make them into pancakes and served us well for breakfast.
In order to find some household income as Dad was out of job due to the handicap, my mother would sew jeans everyday till midnight using the only oil lamp in the house and children like my sisters and me, would help to sew umbrellas during our free time to supplement income. We even worked on firecrackers which were not banned in Singapore then.
There was always no problem when we do not have the money to buy toys. As children, we created our own fun for leisure. Hop scotch was a simple game with no expense needed. Five stones were made from torn clothing with sand from nature and used milk cans into lanterns. Spiders were caught among the bushes and used match boxes as their homes. Fighting with spiders was the most interesting games enjoyed by the kids then. Fishes were caught in big drains and happily shown to others in used bottles. Kites were made from bamboo taken from nature with newspapers and flying kites in a windy afternoon always end up in a high.
Though as children, with the given situation, you may feel that I am very deprived but I felt I was not. I felt that poverty had a big lesson for me. I learned to be thrifty, understood hunger better and was able to be easily satisfied with just simple things. This was my simplest and biggest lesson on character building for just being poor.
