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  • Interior Design Firm Partners HOME To Raise Funds For Cancer-Stricken Bangladeshi Employee

    Interior Design Firm Partners HOME To Raise Funds For Cancer-Stricken Bangladeshi Employee

    SINGAPORE: Things were looking well for Mr Alam Shah, who had found a job as a construction supervisor at an interior design firm, after working here for four years as a manual labourer.

    The 31-year-old was two months into his new job, earning S$1,200 a month, with a bride waiting for him in Bangladesh, until one word shattered his dreams: Cancer. Doctors gave him less than a year to live, if the disease was left untreated.

    Other employers might have sent Mr Alam, a work-permit holder, home once he was deemed medically fit to travel, but his employer, Archetype, decided otherwise. It is now trying to raise funds for his medical treatment, estimated to cost about S$60,000.

    The firm will dig into its profits to help Mr Alam, but has also roped in the Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics (HOME). It is raising funds through HOME’s account on charity portal SG Gives — something the non-governmental organisation said was a first for an employer.

    Mr Alam underwent surgery immediately after he was diagnosed with Stage 3 brain cancer early last month. However, doctors managed to remove only 40 per cent of the tumour. Mr Alam would have to undergo radiotherapy and chemotherapy to try to stop the rest of the cancer from spreading, which might prolong his life by up to 10 years.

    Mr Alam is covered under medical insurance that employers are required to buy for their work-pass holders, but the S$15,000 policy was only enough to cover his three-day stay at the Singapore General Hospital’s intensive care unit. Chemotherapy alone would cost up to S$30,000.

    Archetype operations manager Melissa Tan said the firm hopes to raise about S$100,000, which would pay for the treatments, follow-up care in Bangladesh and to help his ageing parents financially.

    The company had approached various non-governmental organisations and Government channels to enlist help for Mr Alam. However, they turned the firm down and advised it to send him back to Bangladesh.

    “Even if we sent him home, he would still have no money to pay for treatment,” said Ms Tan.

    So far, Archetype, which Ms Tan said could not afford to cover all of the costs, has raised about S$2,200.

    A check with the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) showed that employers are required to buy mandatory medical insurance of at least S$15,000 per foreign worker, which provides basic cover for hospitalisation expenses.

    An MOM spokesperson said under the Employment of Foreign Manpower (Work Passes) Regulations, employers are responsible for the costs of providing medical treatment for their work-permit holders, regardless of whether the conditions are work-related.

    “The Government does not provide healthcare subsidies to foreigners. If the work-permit holder requires long-term medical care arising from a non-work-related ailment, the employer may send the foreign worker home to continue treatment at the worker’s own expense, once the worker’s condition has stabilised and the worker is deemed medically fit to travel,” the spokesperson added.

    HOME executive director Jolovan Wham said Mr Alam’s case raises the question of whether the medical coverage provided to work-permit holders is comprehensive enough. “This is definitely something we need to look into again as these workers play an important role in this country,” he said.

    As of June, there are 980,800 work-permit holders in Singapore, making up 17.9 per cent of the total population.

    For more details on how to make a donation for Mr Alam, send an email to [email protected] or [email protected].

  • Singaporeans Less Open to Inter-Racial Dating

    Singaporeans Less Open to Inter-Racial Dating

    SINGAPORE – Despite interracial marriages being on the rise here, most Singaporeans still prefer dating within their own race, data from a major dating agency here has shown.

    Last year, 20.9 per cent of marriages registered here involved couples of different races, up from 20.7 per cent in 2012.

    But of the almost 1,000 Singaporean members of dating agency Lunch Actually, 92.5 per cent would rather not date people of other ethnicities.

    This is a higher proportion than 89.6 per cent of the agency’s members in Hong Kong, and 76.6 per cent of those in Malaysia.

    Altogether, the data analysed was from close to 3,000 of the agency’s members in the three territories. It takes into consideration the clients’ first preferences for their ideal partner.

    Lunch Actually CEO Violet Lim, 34, theorises the results may be because most of the agency’s Singaporean clientele are Chinese.

    “Social conditioning and family expectations may lead to them to prefer to date other Chinese people first,” she said. “It’s not necessarily that they’re not open to dating other races, but the people who join our dating agency are generally looking to settle down and have to think about factors such as finding somebody their family might approve of.

    “It’s important to realise there is a difference between a person’s first dating preferences and the person they actually end up being compatible with.”

    Of the 996 clients surveyed in Singapore, 488 women and 462 men were Chinese.

    The data was analysed by data analytics company Qlik using its app called Qlik Sense. Qlik then worked with Lunch Actually to combine the app with the agency’s data into a new app, which generates graphs and charts that show such dating trends. This new app, The Ideal Partner, can be downloaded for free from http://www.qlik.com/datingtrends.

    Other results produced by the new app also showed more “traditional preferences” among the singles surveyed in all three territories, Ms Lim said.

    For instance, men across all age ranges showed a preference for women in their 20s. While younger women preferred men aged 30 to 35, older women aged 45 to 50 seemed more inclined towards younger men aged 25 to 35.

    Close to 80 per cent of the men surveyed did not want to date divorcees, and 93.8 per cent preferred not to date people who already have children. Women were more open on this front, with 33.5 per cent willing to date divorcees and 12.9 per cent willing to date those with children.

    Ms Lim hopes to use the data to understand her clientele better and to help them manage their expectations.

    “People are wired to look for certain things in their ideal partners,” she said. “If we share this data with them, they might realise some expectations are unrealistic and consider being more open about who they are willing to go out with.”

    The next step will be to analyse how closely the clients’ visions of their ideal partners correspond to the people they are matched with.

    Qlik Sense can be adapted to analyse other sets of data. Qlik Asia’s vice president Terry Smagh, 38, said: “The ability to take data such as these survey statistics from Lunch Actually and drop it into Qlik Sense for visual analysis is something that many businesses, including small and medium enterprises in singapore, will find valuable.”

     

    Source: www.straitstimes.com

  • Xenophobic Singaporeans and What We Can Do About It

    Xenophobic Singaporeans and What We Can Do About It

    Xenophobia is on the rise in Singapore. After a wealthy Chinese expatriate crashed his Ferrari into a taxi and killed the driver and passenger in May 2012, and Indian migrant workers rioted in response to the death of a fellow employee in 2013, racist comments have become increasingly prevalent on online social-networking platforms. 80% of participants in an online 2012 Yahoo! poll agreed that “Singaporeans are turning xenophobic.” But something strange is also going on: even though xenophobia seems to have increased, 6 out of 10 Singaporeans still agree or strongly agree that the country is free from both racial and religious tension.

    Is there a contradiction here? What’s happened, and where are we going?

    Paul Chu examines this question in his dissertation, titled “Migration and the Politics of Multiculturalism in Singapore“.

    What’s Going On?

    The Chinese-Malay-Indian-Other model has framed our understanding of race since the colonial era, when the Jackson Plan of 1822 first segregated Singaporeans by ethnicity. But the huge wave of immigration has stretched the model, and it isn’t flexible enough to cope.

    1. The CMIO model is struggling to cope with recent challenges

    The Singapore state is what academics call “corporatist”. This means that a strong elite sets social norms and has firm political authority to achieve harmony. The CMIO model was the chosen norm. It has maintained racial harmony in three ways:

    1.De-politicizing ethnicity
    2.influencing people to turn ethnic-based loyalty into a civic-based one
    3.promoting the principle of equality across all ethnic groups

    While the model has worked for a long time, it is facing a challenge unlike any it has seen before because of the unprecedented levels of migration since 2005. The graph below shows this rapid increase in the migrant population:

    2. Singaporean society does not understand race like the CMIO model

    One major reason why CMIO racial categorization cannot cope with migrants is that it conflates race, ethnicity and culture. Society, on the other hand, seems to distinguish between the three ideas.

    For example, a 2013 IPS-OnePeople.sg survey of over 4000 Singaporeans showed that while 93.8% of non-Chinese respondents were comfortable with a Singaporean-Chinese boss, this figure dropped by nearly 20 percentage points if he was Mainland-Chinese. We see this also with other races. In the curry feud in 2011, a Singaporean-Chinese woman defended a Singaporean-Indian family, and was “incensed with a People’s Republic of China family telling my fellowmen not to cook curry”, suggesting a redefinition of “us” and “them” that was along cultural rather than racial lines.

    3. Relying on the government to solve the problem is part of the problem

    The corporatist model that underlies CMIO also creates a larger problem: it has made citizens rely too much on the government to determine racial identity. When citizens are resentful about immigrants, they look to the state to solve the problem. But given that Singaporeans are increasingly skeptical about central authority, they also reject the state’s solutions. Ultimately, this leads to greater dissatisfaction with both the state and immigrants, thereby completing a vicious downward spiral as shown below:

    Spiral

    What can we do?

    1. Recognize that race is not the only identity marker.

    Integration will not happen just because migrants share the same race as Singaporeans. Racial categories such as “Chinese” or “Indian” are complicated by class and nationality. While the government has officially dialed down overt race-based categorizations, the narrative of the CMIO model still influences society’s understanding of race. Instead, we should encourage a broad understanding of our national identity as Singaporeans, yet also recognize our migrant roots so that even new migrants can integrate.

    2. Be more transparent.

    We as Singaporeans need to take charge of integrating foreigners. Increasing transparency around discussions about migration and ethnicity will make it easier for us to do so. For example, if citizens were able to access public information about the non-residents living around them, or knew more about the procedures behind PR and citizen selection, we would be more likely to own the problem than to see this as an issue that the government must solve.

    3. Realize that citizenship is not just about economics.

    The state needs to show that they appreciate the emotive aspect of citizenship, instead of justifying migration entirely on economic grounds and demanding compliance. The citizenship naturalization process should be more rigorous to ensure better integration.

    4. Strive for encounters, not just physical co-existence.

    Different cultures and races should not just exist side by side, each in their own bubble. That is a holdover from the colonial idea of segregation and with it the CMIO model. Instead, the goal should be to have different cultures and races interact constructively with one another.

     

    This article snapshot was prepared by the editorial team. It was based on a final year dissertation at the University of Cambridge written by Paul Chu, who received First Class Honours for his work and presented the paper at the IRiS-University of Birmingham International Conference 2014 on Superdiversity. For more insights and nuance, please see the full paper.

     

    Source: http://singaporepolicyjournal.com

  • Man Leaves Wife And Their 10 Children To Fend For Themselves

    Man Leaves Wife And Their 10 Children To Fend For Themselves

    A single mother and her 10 children are struggling to survive after their father left them for another woman two years ago.

    Over the past year, debt collectors – both legal and illegal – have gone to Madam Rafeah Abdul Kadir’s three-room flat in Hougang to look for her estranged husband, Mr Mazlan Abdul, 37.

    An arrest warrant was also issued for Mr Mazlan after he defaulted on maintenance payments since April this year.

    Meanwhile, he can be seen on Facebook posing for selfies with his girlfriend and dancing with her in a Bollywood club.

    Said an upset Madam Rafeah: “He goes out with his parents and girlfriend to eat at nice places. He’s clearly having a good time. What about his children? What are they supposed to eat?”

     

    Source: www.tnp.sg

  • 71 Year Old Uncle Sleeps On Cardboard

    71 Year Old Uncle Sleeps On Cardboard

    “I’m 71 years old. I got no house, so I put cardboard on floor and sleep here. Sometimes I work and get money to pay for one night at someone’s place and clean my clothes. But sometimes it rain, so you wake up and got clothes still wet, but you wear them still, because what can you do?”

    “Uncle, what sort of job do you do?”

    “Different job. Once a day at 7pm man come and drive us to Keppel. I drive jeep or van and carry heavy item. I get 15-20 dollar every day I work, but sometimes if got no work then got no pay. So every day have to budget and eat. But the man don’t care if we earn or not, he only take us there and bring us back to Chinatown.”

    “Uncle, do you have any family here?”

    “I had one family very old but he died right here 3 days ago after falling asleep, no one know what happened. I call police. They come, take report. Other time when people die and you call them, they ask you to come to station, write report and name, and sometimes you get 50 dollars for reporting. Happened 4-5 times already in Chinatown, cannot remember any more. Money very hard to come by you see.”

    “Then how do you manage?”

    “Eat carefully, always eat 1 dollar bread in morning. Spend about 15 dollars a day, and sometimes sleep at friend’s house, so okay already.. But best day is when you get extra job to fix someone’s car because they don’t know how to fix. That day you get 25 dollar extra. And then you know what you can buy for breakfast? Roti Prata!”

    Humans of Singapore

    *Comment first appeared on https://www.facebook.com/HumansOfSG?

     

    Source: www.therealsingapore.com

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