As luck would have it though, I read it again and signed up a week later. Because, I loved drawing and painting as a child , simple as that. And I'm glad I did.
Paint-A-Home was started in the year 2000 with the aim of providing volunteers an opportunity to make a positive difference in the community to improve the living conditions of welfare homes in Singapore.
Through the years, PAH volunteers have gone round to different parts of Singapore and repainted welfare homes that serve diverse sections of our society, including Cherry Nursing Home (2005), Pertapis Children’s Home (2006) and Bishan Home for the Intellectually Disabled (2007). This year, we went to Jamiyah Children's Home, a home walking distance from Eunos MRT station.
Every year a home will be given a new coat of paint, along with colorful murals to beautify its surroundings. P-A-H has since grown to be a very popular project amongst NUS students in which many sign up to contribute back to the society every year.
And boy was it popular. So popular in fact that because I signed up so late, I was put on the waiting list instead. It took a little string pulling for my name to make it into the main group. And on Saturday bright early in the morning at 0845, I saw no lesser than 30 people waiting at Eunos MRT. That number ballooned to about 60 to 70 people at the home itself. It was really quite a sight to behold.
Like any major event, the logistics for it was staggering. There were ladders to despatch, newspapers to cover the floor with, masking tape to prevent painting over powerpoints and doorframes and of course buckets and buckets of paint. And yet, I felt it was really quite well coordinated. The organising committee gave out paints and other equipment based on the different rooms.
And the pictures painted on each room starts as just that - a picture.
There is Winnie the pooh, Ee-yawh and of course Tigger. There are also some unnamed elephants. This is translated into chalk sketchings onto the wall by a unsuspecting artist.
What you see here, is actually cloumn B of the picture itself. I think it's marvelous. Until of course I saw the other rooms which have already completed painting.
I was completely floored. I knew then I was a PAH convert.And if that did not cause you to smile a little it may be because dolphins and smiling children aren't your kind of thing. To be fair, not all pictures are of peace and love and all the wonderfuly heart-warming things we have come to associate with kids.
There is the nationalistic.
There's even space for the ardent football fan! And it's not only about red devils by the way.
There's Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal, complete with screaming, flag waving spectators.
Me? My group and I were in charge of painting the corridors. We were responsible for converting this -
To this.
It may not elicit the kind of ohhs and ahhs as the rooms but it was detailed and surgically precise work. I happily took to painting the petals and loved every second of it.
Sure, you might think, the paintings are so-so and the effort little more than commendable. But here's the part where I think took the cake for the day. In the midst of painting, some volunteers were invited to participate in interaction games with the kids. It was there that I met Harry. At first he didn't join the games at all. We had 3 games and he just sat at the table watching us. When we starting making paper puppets, however, he positively almost flew over.
" I want!"
So we spent half an hour of so with him decorating his puppet and me cutting out pieces for him to fix together. It was the kind of puppet where when you pulled the string down, the legs and arms flew up. The first time I told him to tug on the string, he smiled so wide, he nearly blinded me. And that was about the time he said I was the only one who could call him "Harry Potter" and with his small hands tugged at me and asked me if I was coming back.
It broke my heart to tell him no. And therein lies the challenge. Because at the end of the day, we have to come back to the real world and the real world as we know it, sadly, isn't as flowery and pure and wonderful with dolphins and and smiling children. It is a relentless-paper-chase, a winner-take-all and dare I say it, every-man-for-himself kind of place. It is the kind of place where, and I am going to use a vulgar word here, failing is frowned upon by society.
The challenge is remembering that child-like wonder when Harry smiled as the arms and legs flew up. It's the two kids I taught twinkle twinkle little star to and knowing that they will remember how to play because they made a marking on the piano keys. It's translating an entire page of Chinese news to giggles, sometimes only using the pictures because my Chinese sucked.
It's knowing that I made a difference, no matter how transient. And in my humble opinion, that is the best present I got for myself in all my 22 years of my life.
PAH 09 awaits!
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