NYAA Entry - Service - Befriending

Date: 29th January 2008
Venue: MPFSC (Blk 6, Marine Terrace)
Duration: 2 hour (1445 – 1645)
People involved: Edmund, Thomas and zhan liang

Today was the second befriending session with Mdm Ng. We walked from school at about 1430 hours and reached Mdm Ng’s apartment at about 1445 hours. We had no need to report to Seow Hong anymore as subsequent visits after the first will be arranged directly with Mdm Ng.

The door of her apartment was closed when we arrived and we feared that she was not at home. However, after we rang the doorbell, the familiar barking sounds of her dog indicated to us that she was at home. Upon seeing her friends (as what she considers us to be) at the door, she opened the door and welcomed us in. Once again, she displays her hospitality as she tries her best to make us feel at home, offering us Chinese New Year cookies and drinks as soon as we entered. We kept telling her that we were full and that she does not need to walk around offering snacks and drinks to us, asking her to take a seat, but she continued to, pushing those snacks and drinks to us, leaving us no choice but to accept her offers, before she would sit down. Her hospitality is so good that it is now achieving some sort of a reverse effect in that we were starting to feel uneasy, always being offered snacks and drinks whenever we visited her.

However, as soon as we started conversing with her, her friendliness and ease to talk to made us feel really comfortable again. She asked us about school, our schoolmates and how we are coping; about family, how close we are, how often and what we do when we spend time together; about overseas holiday trips with family, where we have went and our experiences; and about overseas CIP trips, where we have went and what we did there. We also discussed certain issues such as the influence of Western culture in Singapore, its good and bad points; and boy-girl relationships at teenage age, our thoughts about it. She is quite a frank and open person, thus she spontaneously shares her views, thoughts and opinions, which are informative and valuable, and we always gain lots of new knowledge from our conversations with her.

We recalled her telling us during our previous visit last week that her dog was injured and was scheduled to go to the vet earlier this morning, thus we asked her what its situation was. She told us that the vet said the dog’s injury was not serious to the extent of requiring an operation, but would require some medication to reduce the pain and some time for the injury to recover. We were quite relieved and happy for Mdm Ng to hear that as she revealed to us on our previous visit that she has quite an attachment to the dog ever since it arrived with her rental tenant last year, thus with her dog being alright, she would feel better too. Now, our worry is her check-up tomorrow, on the 30th of January, which will reveal the seriousness of her stomach health problems. However, we have faith and believe that everything will be alright for her.

Besides her health problems, she does not have any immediate needs that require our attention, but we will be constantly looking out for her and to provide her with any assistance we can anytime she needs. We are also gradually getting used to the way she speaks, thus being able to understand and communicate with her better. This second session has been another rewarding and enjoyable one for us and we will be looking forward to our next session with Mdm Ng.