Category: Singapore

By Vi

After 5 days of leadership training (see blog May 5), Goducate workers from the Philippines stayed on in Singapore for 3 days for a workshop on addiction recovery. They were joined by 2 Singaporean Goducate volunteers.

The addiction-recovery training was not targeted at any particular type of addiction, though at the moment the focus in the Philippines is on drug addiction. Over there, the government under President Rodrigo Duterte has made it compulsory for drug addicts and pushers to surrender to the authorities.

The surrenderees report weekly to the police stations, and Goducate has been invited to help with the rehabilitation of these people in Laguna. There are some 68,000 surrenderees in this province. The Goducate team has been seeing 350-400 of them every week.

The training was conducted by Val Gonzales, an experienced counsellor in the USA and now dean of the School of Counselling at the Singapore Bible College. The Goducate team from Laguna learnt much about how to handle the drug surrenderees. One of their first jobs will be to recruit people to the team and pass on the skills they learnt to these new members.

The Happy Happy English program for foreign workers in Singapore is not only about teaching the workers English. As the name of the program implies, it is also about making the workers happy. So on May 1, Labour Day, Goducate arranged an outing for the foreign-worker students from 3 dormitories to have a morning of fun and games and lunch.

The event was held at the Chinese Garden, and was ably organized for us by students from Anglo Chinese School Independent. After an introduction to zumba dancing as an ice-breaker, the workers were divided into 5 teams. First, there was an Amazing Race, with tasks to be completed at specific points in the Garden. Then came a Scavenger Hunt. For most of the workers, all these activities were new to them and great fun, topped by prizes given to all the teams.