Nearer the Sky: Courage

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Courage Courage might seem like an old fashioned virtue, especially in peaceful Singapore. But that would be too narrow a definition of the word.

Courage actually takes many forms.

Sometimes it does involve being brave while facing dangerous, life-threatening situations.

At other times, courage is about doing what’s right, not what’s easy. And quite often, it is about finding the will to continue, despite the pain, the doubts, the fears.

Volunteer healthcare worker Ong Bee Cheng exemplifies physical courage. During the 12 years she was in Afghanistan, Bee Cheng had numerous close encounters with death. She regularly endured rocket attacks and suicide bombings around her so that she could help ordinary Afghans.

it off. Discouraged and depressed, she hung up her spikes and called it a day. However, she was eventually able to overcome her mental barriers and when asked to don the national colours again, she did. And set a new record in the process.

Many athletes exemplify courage, not because what they do is hard, though it is, but because they push themselves to their limit and this exacts a heavy toll on their bodies and their minds. Yet, despite the physical pain and mental anguish, they do not give up.

Gemma Rose Foo ruptured her spleen just six months before the Rio Paralympics but that did not stop her from going to Brazil as part of the para-equestrian team. Another team member, Hilary Su, began riding as therapy for her cerebral palsy. She eventually became such a good rider that she was asked to join the Singapore team.

High jumper Michelle Sng was doing well in her athletic career when she fractured her shin during training. The pain persisted even after surgery and try as she might, she could not shake

Gymnast Lim Heem Wei took part in the 2010 Commonwealth Games even though she was recovering from bone graft surgery in one foot and a snapped ligament in another.

She managed to win a silver medal and two years later, represented Singapore at the London Olympic Games.

Athletes do not have a monopoly over courage though. Many old girls have experienced serious setbacks in

their lives that they have managed to overcome. In 2003, Vanessa Harijanto survived the JW Marriott Hotel bombing in Jakarta, but it left her with scars, both physical and mental. Slowly and painfully, she was able to recover and rebuild her life, this time around dance.

Church worker Lim Phi-lan suffered a breakdown that left her adrift and in deep despair for a year. Through persistence and prayer, she was able to rediscover her purpose in life.

These old girls amply demonstrate that courage is by no means an old fashioned or irrelevant virtue.

Indeed, the courage to do the right thing and the courage to keep going despite repeated failure and setbacks is precisely what is needed in the world today.

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Physical courage is just one type of courage though. The old girls who abandoned their regular jobs to pursue their dreams display a different kind of courage. Sim Chi Yin left her job as a full-time journalist to become a freelance photographer so that she could use photography and videos to tell important stories. She is now an artist and award-winning photographer. Lyn Lee, on the other hand, gave up a successful legal career to try her hand at baking and being a business owner. She ended up creating the Awfully Chocolate brand which has outlets in Singapore and around Asia.

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Image credit to Jonah M Kessel, New York Times

Sim Chi Yin

Seeing Things Differently

Life as a photographer can be exciting, but it can also be dangerous. In 2014, award-winning photographer Sim Chi Yin (SCGS:1991 - 1994) had a piece of molten tin land on her left eyeball while she was on assignment.

She was photographing the tin industry on the Indonesian island of Belitung and was in a smelting plant when the accident happened. “They gave us all sorts of safety gear but no goggles. We were at a cauldron and molten tin was coming out from a pot and flowing down a drain.�

Her guide reached into her eye and extracted the piece of tin which had solidified and she was taken to a nearby clinic. There, a woman picked up a torchlight to assess the damage. “She looked into my eyes then ran out gasping bakar (burn)!”

“I don’t know much Bahasa Indonesia but I know what ikan bakar is.”

Courtesy of Sim Chi Yin

in China, she had her thumb violently wrenched, completely ripping the ligament that joins the thumb to the hand.

windscreen and two through her window. Without warning, a pair of hands reached through the window and grabbed her camera.

At that time, Chi Yin was at the border of China and North Korea where the French newspaper Le Monde had commissioned her to photograph the presence of North Koreans in the area.

The strap of the camera was wrapped around her right thumb and during the ensuing tug of war (which the North Korean women eventually won), the ligament in her thumb was ripped. Although she has undergone surgery twice since, her thumb has still not been restored to normal. She is a little clumsier now with delicate movements like picking up a coin with her right hand.

At the hospital later, the doctor who examined her said she had been very lucky. A few millimetres the wrong way and the molten metal could have fused her contact lens to her eyeball.

While in a taxi, she spotted a group of women in tracksuits cutting grass outside a factory.

“It didn’t look dangerous. There was no sense something bad was going to happen. It looked like Tuas.”

A year later, however, she was less lucky. While on assignment

The taxi stopped, and she took four shots, two through the

Despite the injury, she has won significant commissions and awards. She was commissioned as the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize

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At one point, a man on top started spraying cold water on the molten tin. “I got probably a little too close,” she recalled.

As he sprayed, a small piece of molten tin shot up into the air. “I was shooting a piece of video, tracking the tin’s flight and my left eye was hidden behind the camera. Before I could react, the molten tin came straight down into the left eye.”

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Chi Yin joined Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) after graduating with a Bachelors degrees in History and a Masters in the History of International Relations from the London School of Economics (LSE) and Political Science. As a reporter for The Straits Times and The New Paper, she regularly pushed the envelope to shine a light on the plight of migrant workers in Singapore.

Courtesy of Sim Chi Yin

photographer to create an exhibition on that year’s laureate: the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. She spent time back at the ChinaNorth Korean border once more and went around the United States to capture photographs that reflect mankind’s relationship with nuclear weapons. These photographs formed part of a year-long photography and video exhibition in Oslo, home of the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 2018, she received the Getty Images and Chris Hondros Fund Award for her work. Eight years before, she was made an inaugural Magnum Foundation

Social Justice and Photography Fellow at New York University.

Last year, Chi Yin also became the first Asian woman to be voted into the world’s top photo collective, Magnum Photos. She is currently on a full scholarship to do a PhD at King’s College London, combining her visual art practice and the study of war.

These awards recognise not just Chi Yin’s talent as a photographer but her strong sense of social justice. Throughout her career, she has displayed moral courage, choosing to do the right thing, rather than the expedient thing.

After nine years at SPH, during which time she rose to the position of China correspondent for the Straits Times, she abandoned her successful career with the paper for the uncertainty of life as a freelance documentary photographer in China.

In many ways, elements of Chi Yin’s career and her sense of social justice can be traced to her time at SCGS, where she spent her secondary school years.

Back in Secondary One, her parents had given her a camera and she became interested “in light and shadow and shade.”

Teachers recognised her talent and encouraged her. She eventually became the school photographer, shooting events as

to help the less privileged. These visits were not a mandated school programme but something that Ms Sie had organised on her own initiative.

an impression. After the formal Secondary Four class photoshoot, Ms Sie wanted the photographer to take a more informal shot in a different location.

Even as the school gave her the opportunity to hone her interest and skills in photography, one of its teachers, the late Ms Sie Siok Hui, also sensitised her (and her classmates) to the underprivileged in society. Ms Sie, her form teacher in Secondary Three and Four, organised for the class to visit old folks homes as well as a home for the intellectually disabled. Ms Sie wanted to have the girls become aware of society’s less fortunate, and to emphasise that the girls were privileged individuals who would someday be in a position

Ms Sie recalled that Chi Yin’s passion to help the underprivileged. “When the class embarked on community projects voluntarily, she and a few of her classmates displayed such empathy and compassion to the children of special needs and were dedicated to visiting and teaching them till quite near the O-Level.”

Chi Yin recalled: “She said, ‘I know exactly where I would like to take this photo.’ So she had us go up the stairs, to stand on the second floor, right above the word ‘Courage’ — part of the school motto displayed in the atrium.

Ms Sie also impressed upon the young Chi Yin about the need to have moral courage. One incident, in particular, made Courtesy of Sim Chi Yin

“She told us that you’re graduating now but to get through life, you’re going to need a lot of courage, and specifically, you’re going to need a lot of moral courage, because you’re going to face a lot of decisions in life that are going to need you to make a call. And it’s going to take moral courage to make the right call. And that is something I have always carried with me.”

Chi Yin also recalls having long chats with Mrs Julie Lee, the school registrar at the time, and that those conversations sparked a curiosity for thinking beyond school work, kept her grounded through problems at home at the time. Along with Ms Sie, Mrs Lee was the other person in school whom Chi Yin often wrote letters

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well as things and people around school. She was often seen around the school with her camera bag on one shoulder and her tennis bag on the other.

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to. They wrote back to her as well and the letter-writing was a lifeline for her in difficult times, she said.

The care that the two women showed her also demonstrated the power of caring for others.

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Years later at LSE, Chi Yin began to combine her love for photography and her passion for social justice. She volunteered with an after-school care centre in the district of Brixton, taking photographs for them. Even These experiences from school left when she was doing her Masters an impact on the teenager, and degree, she found time to she became somewhat obsessed work with a charity in Romania with the notion of “being useful” in that helps the Roma people, society. In Secondary 4, she reached raising money for them to build out to the Salvation Army in Bukit a local clinic.

Panjang, which was where she lived at the time. “I went and knocked “Being a person of use on their door and said: ‘Hey, can I in society has been my help in any way?’”And that is how obsession as a teenager.” she became the kettle girl for two Christmas seasons in a row, loudly After Chi Yin joined SPH, she ringing the bell outside Far East continued to work on social Plaza, urging people to donate. justice issues, writing about

the disabled, the poor, and the marginalised in Singapore, and about migrant workers. While at working at SPH, she also took leave to work on a book project for the International Labour Organisation where she followed 25 Indonesian domestic workers on their migration journey, accompanying them from their villages to Singapore or from Singapore back home.

She worked her way through different departments at SPH and in 2007 was posted as a foreign correspondent based in China for The Straits Times. However, even as she enjoyed writing and won multiple awards for her feature stories accompanied by her pictures, her first love was photography. She asked repeatedly to be reassigned as a photographer, but they kept turning her down.

Eventually, after nine years, she decided to leave SPH, because she felt that in her bones she wanted to tell stories with visuals, not just words — and she knew there was a world beyond what she’d already experienced. “When you are out in the world, you see a world vastly beyond Singapore.” She grappled with much uncertainty. “I felt I wanted to see if I could work on an international level.”

Courtesy of Sim Chi Yin

Courtesy of Sim Chi Yin

She spent four years working on a documentary called Dying to Breathe which explored the life and slow death of a gold miner, He Quangui, and his struggles with silicosis, a respiratory illness he contracted from working in an unregulated gold mine.

Today, she is based in London and Beijing, working on her PhD research, making books and working on art commissions. Her work has evolved to focus more on researchheavy, long-form work, sometimes involving landscape photography and film-making.

Her work brings together her background as a journalist as well as a historian with artistic practice. Her 2018 installation at the Esplanade, One Day We’ll Understand, put the spotlight on former leftists of postwar Malaya who now live in Malaysia, Thailand, China and Singapore.

The exhibition came out of a yearlong project excavating the hidden history of her paternal grandfather who had been deported to China

by the British for being a leftist.

He was subsequently executed by Kuomintang soldiers during the Chinese civil war.

While Chi Yin has certainly come a long way since her days at SCGS, some fundamental things have not changed. As the late Ms Sie said:“This self same drive of always doing her utmost, always considering the community especially underrepresented voices, the deep sense of commitment and dedication to an inner vision and her calling to pursue higher ground for the society at large are the hallmarks of her pathway.

“Chi Yin remains faithful to her inner calling.”

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As a freelance photographer, she survives on commissions and consultations. However, her passion for social justice continues to drive her to work on personal projects, often self-funded and which take years. She produced Rat Tribe, a multimedia piece that looks at migrant workers living in Beijing who live in cheap, underground apartments.

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Michelle Sng The Comeback Queen National athlete Michelle Sng (SCGS: 2000 - 2003) is no stranger to reaching great heights. She’s broken the national record for the women’s high jump three times, twice in 2006 and again in 2015 when she cleared 1.84m.

At the 2017 Southeast Asian (SEA) Games, she brought home the gold in the event, Singapore’s first since 1965.

Even though she has soared to incredible heights, Michelle has also plumbed great depths. For three years, she was plagued by a shin injury and in 2010, she decided to hang up her spikes, believing that she could no longer perform. It would take her another three years before she returned to the sport.

Ironically, while she is a high jumper, Michelle’s shin injury in 2007 was sustained from a fall that occurred when she attempted to jump over hurdles as part of her training.

Image credit to Gabe Chen Photography

She iced her shin and rested, but after a couple of months, it did not get better. An MRI and an X-ray showed why: a horizontal stress fracture. In 2008, she went to Germany for surgery. “It worked fine. I recovered fully. But psychologically, I hadn’t recovered.”

Courtesy of Michelle Sng

Although she has a degree in Business Management from the Singapore Management University, Michelle decided that she enjoyed At one point, she became reliant on teaching more and started teaching painkillers and she decided to give up the sport. “It came to a point, I She ended up in northern Vietnam, English at an enrichment centre. Her new life was starting to take shape was so unhappy in the sport, I didn’t and trekked up Fansipan, which at and high jump had no place in it. want to tarnish it anymore.”

3,143 m, is the highest mountain in Then in 2013, her old coach called.

Indochina. A friend from Malaysia Singapore was hosting the 2015 Not being an athlete was a big joined her during the trek. “At our SEA Games; would she like to come blow to her. She had been winning first rest stop, she asked ‘How is medals nationally since her teens your leg feeling?’ She pointed at my back to represent the country? and it was her whole identity. If shin. That’s when I realised that it “When she first asked me, I said she wasn’t a high jumper, she did didn’t hurt anymore.” ‘no’. It was a very sure ‘no’. I’m done. not know who she was. Eventually, Enough. I love teaching and I was however, she discovered a new Although the pain was no more, doing a lot of yoga.” identity for herself. “Michelle Sng: a Michelle had no plans to dust off good daughter and a good friend. her spikes. She had been bitten by However, because of her love for That saved me.” the travel bug, and all she wanted the sport, she agreed to return to to do was to work and save up help to coach. Along the way, she Towards the end of 2011, Michelle enough money so that she could felt that she had to get back into decided to go backpacking alone travel some more. around Asia. “I had spent my entire life training. I never got a proper break, so I decided to go for three months.”

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After the surgery, she attempted to train, but each time she did, she felt pain. “Even just jogging, you could tell I was limping. I was competing through the pain.”

Courtesy of Michelle Sng

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shape, and that was the slippery slope that led her to eventually returning to the high jump competitively.

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It is no easy task to return to a sport professionally after a long break.

The training was brutal. “I cried a lot. There was a lot of frustration. I asked myself, ‘Why do I want to do this again?’”

Michelle persevered. Fuelled by her competitive instinct, she overcame the pain and began jumping again.

As such, the fact that she set her national record for the high jump after her long break, makes her achievement doubly impressive.

Michelle’s fierce competitive streak showed itself at an early age. After she became the sports captain of her Secondary One class at SCGS in 2000, she was determined to win the inter-class competition. How determined? She wanted to get the maximum number of points, which meant fielding a participant in every event. No one had signed up for the high jump, so she decided to do it herself. “Since no one is going to do it, I will do it myself.”

There was just one small She embraced the challenge seriously. problem — she had never done high “I wanted to win the national school jump before. title. Through friends from different schools, I found out who the reigning Undeterred, she went online, found champion was. She was a year older. instructions and printed out notes.

She had never lost before, so my aim “There was no YouTube then, so I was to defeat her.” didn’t get to watch videos. It was just stick figures, and crosses and “I had no training, no spike shoes, circles. I just looked at pictures and nothing. I just knew I was going to tried it out.” beat her.”

Remarkably, she went on to break the school record for the C Division, clearing 1.51metres even though she did not have proper gear, specifically spiked shoes. Impressed, her teachers recommended she try out for the national championships.

She did.

That might have been that for her high jump career. At the time, Michelle was a busy teenager. She was dancing with the Singapore Ballet Academy and playing netball for the school. The high jump did not feature on her radar at all.

After Michelle won the national championships for two consecutive years, SCGS decided that her talent needed to be cultivated, and secured a coach for her. It was only then that she started seriously training for the event that would subsequently define her.

Today, Michelle is still a fierce competitor. To prepare for the 2017 SEA Games, she quit her teaching job and moved to Sydney to train

Michelle is now one more step closer to that dream. In 2019, she was picked to represent Singapore at the SEA Games that will be held in the Philippines at the end of the year. “I always think it’s a privilege to don national colours and now that I’ve been selected, I will do my best.”

smooth sailing. It’s a sure thing you will meet obstacles. You can choose to sink or to rise above it.

Nobody can do that except you.”

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The next year, at the school sports day, she took part in the high jump again and after winning, her teachers suggested she should go for the national schools championships again.

with a coach because she wanted to In addition to pursuing her personal be fully prepared for her event. ambitions, Michelle is also helping to build up the sport in Singapore. She Over the years, Michelle has is coaching at various schools around mellowed slightly. She puts this the country and she is helping to down to her experience travelling grow the community by organising around the world. During her high jump competitions. three-year hiatus, she backpacked through 22 countries. After Given her life story, it is not surprising winning her Gold medal at the that she is a big believer in taking 2017 SEA Games, she celebrated personal responsibility. “Everything by backpacking through Bosnia, starts with you. There is no one who Montenegro and Serbia for two is responsible for your life, your weeks. “Travelling changed me happiness. If you find yourself with a lot. I’m a little bit less intense. something that you’re not happy Before, failure was not an option. with, you make a decision to do Now, I believe things happen for something about it.” a reason.”

Based on her own experience, She has yet to hang up her spikes she also has advice about and she has set her sights on the overcoming obstacles.

Olympics. “I’ve wanted to go since the age of 9 so I am definitely going “Through adversity, there can to be training.” be growth. Life is not going to be

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Courtesy of Ong Bee Cheng

Ong Bee Cheng Adventures in Afghanistan

Between experiencing rocket attacks, living through suicide bombings and dealing with Taliban Sharia enforcers, it is safe to say that Ong Bee Cheng’s (SCGS: 1962 - 1974) life exemplifies physical courage. Between 1993 and 1998, she worked in Kabul, where she lived through a civil war. She subsequently returned to Kabul between 2004 and 2009, where suicide bombings would regularly rock the city because of the Talibanled insurgency. Somewhat remarkably, she managed to emerge physically unscathed from both stints.

Looking back, there were no clues to suggest that Bee Cheng would end up devoting her life to helping Afghanistan and the Afghan people.

Courtesy of Ong Bee Cheng

For Bee Cheng, the journey down the road less travelled truly began in 1990, when she moved to Pakistan, working with Mercy Corps to help Afghan refugees in the city of Quetta.

Afghanistan had been in turmoil since 1979, following its invasion by By 1983, however, Bee Cheng felt a the Soviet Union. During the war, desire to see the world and answer an estimated 6 million refugees fled the call to be a missionary. She quit the country. While the Soviet Union her job as a dental nurse and began eventually pulled out of the country in 1989, civil war reigned until working with various missionaryrelated organisations as well as her 1996, when the Taliban eventually captured Kabul and installed its church, the Kay Poh Road Baptist own government.

Church. She worked on a ship run by missionaries, travelled around Europe for two years and then went As a result, back in 1990, Afghanistan was still engulfed by to a Bible college in London.

war, and the refugee camps in Pakistan were packed with Afghans escaping the violence and turmoil.

As a trained dental nurse, Bee Cheng’s job in Quetta was to carry out simple dentistry in the refugee camps, mainly extractions and fillings. "If I send people to government hospitals, they come back with broken jaws. So our work was better than the government hospitals," she recollected with pride. In a day, she could carry out 20 to 30 extractions.

Dentistry was much needed in the area at the time. To fill their cavities, the refugees used raw meat, she recalled. Although she was only trained to do simple extractions,

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She was in SCGS for primary school and secondary school. Due to what she described as a ‘dysfunctional family background’ she spent an extra year in primary school and another extra year in secondary school. She eventually left SCGS in 1974, after 12 years. After a stint at Fraser and Neave, she decided that she would be a dental nurse. In 1977, she enrolled in the three-year diploma course at the School of Dental Nursing and then worked for three years at various school dental clinics.

Courtesy of Ong Bee Cheng

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nurse, but ended up working in childhood nutrition instead. She worked in a mother and child health clinic, which was sorely needed because malnutrition was rife at the time. She recalls seeing a three-year-old child who weighed just six kilogrammes.

Even babies were born all wrinkled and looking like old men, she recalled.

74 in the Quetta refugee camps, there was no one else available and she had to carry out complex procedures as well. Fortunately, she had worked with a dentist for eight months on the missionary ship and had learned to carry out some operations.

While most people do not see dentistry as a life or death matter, she recalled how the clinic in Kabul once managed to save the life of an Afghan man. Back in his village, the man had his tooth extracted but its root had been left in. This caused an infection

and the abscess was so large that he could have died of septicemia.

The man had gone from place to place to seek treatment but no one could help.

Fortunately, when he came to her clinic, a visiting American dentist knew what to do. He drained the abscess, using a rubber glove to keep the cut open. “We filled a kidney bowl with the liquid from the abscess,” she recalled.

After three years, the opportunity came to work in Kabul itself. She was supposed to be a dental

"In Afghanistan at the time, for every five kids under five, one would die of a preventable disease," she said.

Although Afghanistan was not quite a full-fledged war zone at the time, it was not particularly safe. There was a civil war raging in the provinces and occasional bombings in Kabul itself. The element of danger was brought home to her soon after she arrived in the city.

"When I arrived here, IAM (International Assistance Mission) said, sign a paper: ‘Do you want to your body to be buried here or taken home?’" She chose to

found huddled in the basement was Bee Cheng herself: “I hate sitting in basements.” During the attacks, she preferred to stay above ground, though inside her house. To relax, she would cook and bring dinner down to her neighbours.

Even after the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, Bee Cheng stayed on, relying on her command of the language, Dari, and the fact that she was a foreigner, to get out of trouble with the Taliban. She never wore the burqa, though she did don a headscarf.

That person would then take the letters out of Afghanistan and ensure they were mailed off from a place where the postal system worked.

There were numerous close shaves and one day, her house was hit by a rocket. Fortunately, that happened when she was in Pakistan on a trip to buy medicine.

If she had been in Kabul at the time, the rocket attack would likely have killed her.

Bee Cheng eventually left Kabul in 1998 because of emotional exhaustion. She went first to Peshawar in Pakistan for a few months, and then to Singapore.

What was supposed to be a yearlong stay in Singapore became two and a half years because her father fell ill.

Things worsened around 1996.

By this time, the civil war in Afghanistan began to reach Kabul. The Taliban forces were making gains and the city itself became a battleground. For six months, the neighbourhood that Bee Cheng lived was sandwiched in a shooting war between government forces and rebels.

“I collected bullets outside my house like souvenirs.”

Shells would fall regularly into the area and because her home had a basement, it became an informal bomb shelter for her neighbours.

The one person who would not be

Courtesy of Ong Bee Cheng

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be buried in Afghanistan in the event of her death. International communication was only by expensive satellite phone.

“Whenever somebody was leaving the country, we would sit up the whole night writing letters by candlelight.”

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In 2004, Bee Cheng decided to return to Afghanistan itself. By this time, the country was safer than during her first stint. Following the September 11th attacks, the US had launched retaliatory attacks on Afghanistan and the Taliban government had been toppled in late 2001. There was a new government and with the promised American aid, the hope that Afghanistan could be rebuilt.

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Courtesy of Ong Bee Cheng

After she managed to get help caring for her father, she returned to working with Afghan refugees again, this time in India. She worked in Delhi from 2001 until 2004, under the World Vision Organisation. She taught English and ran a children’s club. She also worked as a consultant on a project between World Vision and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

She resumed working in nutrition and among other projects, was tasked with improving the food at a hospital. Through a combination of persuasion and threats, she managed to get the hospital to change its cooking methods and as a result, the hospital cut down its use of cooking oil from 300 litres a month to just 70 litres a month.

She also worked with a French nongovernmental organisation to teach Afghans in the villages to eat more healthily. Because their diet is heavy in ghee, or clarified butter, a typical Afghan meal is not very healthy. As

Although Kabul was safer than a decade ago, the threat of violence was always around the corner. While the Taliban was not in power anymore, it had not been completely defeated.

Suicide bombings around the city eventually began to feel normal to her. "You get immune to it. And that is why I realised it was time to go home."

Bee Cheng has been back in Singapore since 2009, though adjusting to life here was not easy.

"It took me five years to feel like a Singaporean again," she said.

Using her rich experience, she conducts training in personal security and risk for people going to places such as Afghanistan where the possibility of being kidnapped

is present. In Afghanistan, "Miss Tan Sock Kern [Former kidnappings were frequently an Principal] always taught us inside job. Back when she was that you don't just follow the in still living in Kabul, she would rules, you must know what is announce to taxi drivers and to right and what is wrong. And her staff, "If you want to kidnap she taught us how to make me, you either feed me or kill me. decisions about what is right I've got no money to give you and and wrong. And I think that anyway, my government doesn't has helped me to stand for pay ransoms." That may or may the truth." not have done the trick; during her time in the country, she was Another enduring influence was never kidnapped. her time in the Girl Guides, which she said helped her to become Today, Bee Cheng still works with more independent.

Afghan refugees, this time in Kuala Lumpur. She travels there While many people might once a month to conduct nutrition describe her life as one of training and to visit patients tremendous privation and in hospital. sacrifice, Bee Cheng herself does A lifetime of working with Afghan refugees is not a regular career path for most Singaporeans, let alone most old girls of SCGS. Despite this, Bee Cheng says that her school days helped shape her into the person she is today.

not see it that way.

"To me, it’s not a sacrifice and if God gives it to me, I will do it all over again."

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she spoke Dari and knew the local customs and cooking styles, she was able to devise healthier meals for the Afghans without radically changing the dishes. This enabled her to make headway where others stumbled.

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Courtesy of Lyn Lee

Chocolate inspires passion.

Lyn Lee

A Story that takes the Cake

For most people, that passion comes from consuming chocolate in all its many glorious forms. Lyn Lee (SCGS: 1986 - 1989), on the other hand, parlayed her passion for eating chocolate into a successful business that is winning fans over in Singapore and abroad.

Lyn is one of the founders of iconic brand Awfully Chocolate, which has 14 outlets (consisting of stores, cafes and restaurants) in Singapore and more than 45 outlets in China.

A trained lawyer, Lyn had always liked chocolate but she could never find the perfect chocolate cake. When a well-known international chocolate chain opened in Singapore, she hurried down to see what it offered but was sorely disappointed. The cakes were large, fanciful and impressive because they had many layers and came in many complicated flavours. But when Lyn ate a slice, she could not taste the chocolate at all. “It was just sort of sweet.”

She felt that there was nowhere in Singapore that really made the kind of chocolate cake she craved.

“I wanted to be able to go to a place and just have a chocolate cake that you can eat over and over and over again. That you

would not get sick of, but would keep growing on you.”

All the partners had full-time jobs so this was “just a bit of a lark”, as she called it. They experimented with different recipes until they found something that worked, then decided to pool their money together to set up a shop selling what they thought was the ideal chocolate cake.

Awfully Chocolate’s now signature minimalist decor was the byproduct of the company’s limited resources in its early days.

Image credit to Awfully Chocolate

In those days, the equipment was very expensive because they all had to be imported from Europe.

“At the end of that, we had no money to decorate the shop!”

They did not even have enough money to buy a display chiller to show off their sole product.

Fortunately, they had a designer friend conceptualise the look of the store to make the absence of decoration look hip and modern.

“If it had been left to us, it would have looked impoverished, but it turned into something really cool with the same limited resources.”

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They have come a long way from 1998, when the company opened its first outlet in Joo Chiat Road with just one item for sale — a sixinch, sinfully rich chocolate cake called the All Chocolate Cake.

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Though none of the partners had experience in the food and beverage hospitality industry, they believed they had the right product. Lyn said, “This is the cake I’d been waiting for my whole life.”

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However, in business, having a good product alone is no guarantee of success. What Awfully Chocolate also had was a stroke of amazing good luck.

The store was around the corner from a very important person, the mother of Michael Chiang, the then editor-in-chief of 8 Days magazine, which Lyn describes as, the Rolling Stone magazine of Singapore at that time. Michael had passed by, seen the store and sent an editor down to check it out. “She was parked outside the shop and she said, ‘Michael says I can’t leave until you give me the scoop.’”

The publicity in 8 Days was the shot in the arm the company needed. “I think our phones didn’t stop ringing for weeks. We couldn’t bake fast enough.”

As remarkable as its success in Singapore has been, it has not always been easy. The company, like most in the food and beverage industry, struggles with the common problems faced by all companies in the hospitality industry here, such as getting good staff.

Singapore imposes a quota on the number of foreigners that businesses can hire, to ensure that Singaporeans will have a job.

Unfortunately, says Lyn, ”No one wants their kid to be a waiter, waitress, cook, or baker.” A part of Lyn’s business ethos is proving that there are many paths to success in life. Lyn regularly talks to her staff on this, and when she has time, speaks to schools on such topics as well.

affect her company’s growth in China but has since learned that doing business overseas requires much more than just speaking the language.

More than anything, Lyn sees Awfully Chocolate as a team, and its accomplishments are the direct results of the team’s efforts. She has also become increasingly proud of flying the Singapore flag wherever she is. That has led to the formation and expansion of Sinpopo Brand, which started as a restaurant in Katong serving up refreshed authentic Singapore flavours. It now boasts two new boutiques where Mao Shan Wang and pandan kaya cakes rule the day. The shelves are also stocked with other homegrown brands curated by her team and include Glory premium pineapple tarts, in new packaging also designed by the Sinpopo Brand team. It is Lyn’s wish that Sinpopo Brand will help bring more Singapore brands overseas in future.

It may come as a surprise to some that Awfully Chocolate has more stores in China than within Singapore. Especially if they knew Lyn as someone who, she admits, did not speak Mandarin very well in her school days. She used to Lyn has come as far as she wonder if her poor Chinese would has thanks to her passion. She believes that doing something

useful and meaningful in life is more important than being a doctor, lawyer or entrepreneur because people say it is the thing to do. She credits SCGS with helping to make her the person she is today.

One particular incident left a deep This is something that has always impression on her. In Secondary stayed with Lyn: One, her Principal, Ms Rosalind Heng, came into the classroom “... that you treat people as and spoke quietly to the girls equals and you say things as about someone who was dealing they are. “And I expect if I with tough personal issues. treat you this way, you will

“Some of my best friends till today are the ones I made in SCGS. I loved the warm, nurturing school culture that focused on building character rather than just academic competition.”

“It was the first time a teacher, let alone a principal, had set herself down and told us very factually what was happening and called for our understanding.”

live up to expectations.”

Image credit to Lim Swee Keng

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Hilary Su The Girl and Her Horse

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Courtesy of Hilary Su

To be an elite athlete, you need talent. But more important than talent is passion. If you have talent but not passion, you would not be willing to put in the hours of training, to run the constant risk of serious injury, and to overcome the anguish of repeated failure necessary to succeed at an elite level.

To represent Singapore in a sport like dressage requires special passion. In addition to the time and effort required for training, the rider will need to buy and maintain a horse.

That Hilary Su (SCGS: 1998 2003) is willing to do all this is evidence of her passion for the sport of para-dressage.

She was invited to join the Singapore para-dressage team in 2017, and hopes able to be represent Singapore at the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics.

Hilary’s place on the national para-dressage team is even more remarkable when one considers that she was invited to don Singapore colours after just six years of riding independently.

and Children’s Hospital. Because of her condition, her right side is significantly weaker: she does not need walking aids but walks with a limp and greets people with a left-hand handshake. The oxygen deprivation also affected her cognitively and she also suffers from epileptic fits, though much less now than when she was younger.

Hilary’s introduction to paradressage came as a result of learning to ride for therapy. She was 14 when her physiotherapist recommended it as a way for her to improve her balance and loosen her muscles. It took her about five years before she was able to ride independently.

Once she started riding independently, she began taking part in competitions and winning them, drawing the attention of the Singapore paralympic team who were looking for a fourth rider to join them.

Laurentia Tan, Singapore’s top para-equestrienne who won a silver at the London Paralympics, met Hilary at her home in 2016 to see if she was serious enough about the sport to join the team and willing to make the necessary sacrifices. Hilary aced the interview and the invitation to join the national team followed soon after.

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Hilary has cerebral palsy resulting from severe pneumonia she contracted almost immediately after she was born. She was on the respirator for three weeks and spent 43 days at the neonatal intensive care unit at KK Women’s Courtesy of Hilary Su

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Because Singapore’s horses are stabled in Germany, the rider will also need to make the 15-hour flight to Cologne on a regular basis to train with that horse.

Then, the athlete will need to take part in competitions, mostly held in Europe.

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Courtesy of Hilary Su

Hilary says she accepted the invitation because “it sounded quite interesting; it’s something new.” Another attraction was that it would give her a target to work towards.

Hilary and her parents bought her horse, Banestro, soon after and they now travel to Germany about four times a year to train with him for a week each time.

In Singapore, Hilary trains at the Bukit Timah Saddle Club about twice a week.

Apart from the stress of competing at an international level, another concern is falling.

She has had two bad spills in Germany, both times resulting in temporary amnesia. “I could not remember the fall,” she says. “Next thing I knew, I was sitting indoors.”

The one silver lining about the temporary amnesia is that she has no fear about getting back onto Banestro.

She likes riding because, as she says, “it’s nice to go bouncing on a horse.” She enjoys being on the national team because she is working towards a goal.

Riding is not Hilary’s only passion at the moment though. In fact, she is probably just as excited, if

not more, about skiing. She only started skiing about six years ago after she had surgery on her foot to straighten it.

She now skis in Japan during the winter months and despite her disability, she can spend the whole day on the slopes. She is now able to ski on the red slopes, which are meant for intermediate skiers.

Travel is another one of Hilary’s passions and despite her disability, her idea of a fun getaway always seems to involve physical activity. She has gone trekking in Iceland and has even visited Antarctica. She visited the

After SCGS, Hilary went on to attend the Overseas Family School where she sat for the International GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) examination. She then obtained a Diploma in Psychology from the Singapore Maufacturing Federation (SMF) Institute of Higher Learning, and subsequently a degree in the same subject

Hilary has certainly come a long way since her early years, and in physical terms, she has achieved much more than her parents have dared to dream.

She has also done well academically given her situation. In addition to her cognitive impairments, she was prone to having fits as a child and when she was in primary school, she would have a seizure almost quarterly. Fortunately, SCGS was very supportive and the teachers even learned how to give Hilary her anti-seizure medication. Her favourite memory of primary school was hanging around with friends during the recess period.

from James Cook University in Singapore in 2017. She is now thinking about attending divinity school.

Given what she has accomplished despite her disabilities, her advice to others is a simple but heartfelt one:

“Don’t give up, pursue your passions.”

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Courtesy of Hilary Su

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continent in December 2018 for two weeks with her family. Apart from spotting animals such as penguins, seals, skua (a seabird) and whales, she also did a bit of hiking as well, climbing to the top of a small hill on Useful Island. The summit is about 50 metre high which does not sound very impressive until you consider that Hilary had to battle uphill through freezing temperatures, difficult terrain and knee-high snow with her weak right leg. Next on her list is a gentler expedition to see the Northern Lights in Finland.

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Courtesy of Sport Singapore

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Lim Heem Wei Achieving Olympic Dreams

In 2012, Lim Heem Wei (SCGS: 1996 - 2006) made Singapore proud by being the first Singaporean to qualify for the women’s artistic gymnastics event at the Olympic Games.

However, what is less well known is that her journey to the London Games actually began in SCGS. Back in Primary One, a teacher, Mrs Anne Ravi, asked if she would be interested in taking up gymnastics. “My parents were happy to send me off somewhere because I was causing too much trouble at home,” she laughed.

Although she did not win a medal in 2001, she would go on to accumlate plenty of silverware subsequently, including gold medals at the SEA Games, as well as a medal at the Asian Games.

Those medals have not come without a price, a price measured in hours and paid in sweat and bone. Heem Wei has had her share of injuries, which she has had to struggle through.

Before the trials for the 2007 SEA Games, she injured her back; it was a stress fracture in her vertebrae, the L5, that took close to two months to heal.

Nonetheless, she was on the team that went to Thailand that year and came back with a Gold. The next year, she injured her left foot.

She could not jump but still went for a competition, despite the

pain. "It was hurting a lot and I did has picked up the most medals. very badly," she recalled.

She was part of the Singapore team that won the Gold at the After the competition, a scan 2005 Manila SEA Games, the 2007 revealed the source of the pain: a Games in Thailand and the 2011 stress fracture.

Games in Palembang.

She was put in a boot cast and told to rest but of course, she ignored the doctor’s orders and continued training. Eight months later, the fracture had not healed and the decision was made to gone for bone graft surgery.

"About a week later, I went back for training."

Despite this, the SEA Games is also when she experienced one of her lowest points in her career.

It was 2005. She was 16 years old, and she had been so determined to do well that she had taken a year off from school to train.

Then disaster struck: during training, she snapped a ligament in her other foot. This was a little before the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in 2010 and she still had not fully recovered by the time the Games began.

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"I went into competition with no hope at all," she recalled.

Despite this, she snagged a Silver medal for her favourite event, the balance beam.

While she has taken part in the Olympics, the Asian Championships and the Commonwealth Games, it is at the SEA Games that Heem Wei

Courtesy of Sport Singapore

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Although it was purely chance that introduced young Heem Wei to the sport, she eventually demonstrated an ability and a determination to do well. At the age of 12, she represented Singapore at the Southeast Asia (SEA) Games. She was in Primary Six and was one of youngest participants that Singapore sent to the Kuala Lumpur Games.

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"I was one of the strongest on the team. At that time, I was the most prepared."

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During the competition itself, however, she did not advance beyond the first day of the competition. The Singapore team eventually won a Gold, but she personally did not qualify for the finals for any of her events. "I had four or five chances to qualify for the finals but I just blew it."

To make this worse, she was the team captain. She put on a brave face and busied herself by helping out and keeping the team motivated. Internally, she was a mess, she admitted.

After the SEA Games, Heem Wei had second thoughts about continuing with the sport. "When I came back, I thought, ‘Maybe I'm not cut out for the sport. Maybe I can try something else.’"

Fortunately, her coaches rallied around her, and with another competition coming up, there was no time for self-pity. At that competition, she redeemed herself by being the only gymnast from Singapore to qualify for the 2006 Asian Games.

During most of her gymnastics career, Heem Wei has had to balance her sports and her studies.

The training was punishing and there were numerous sacrifices to be made. In 2006, the year she qualified for the Asian Games, she had to train for the games while preparing for her GCE O-Levels.

There was so little time left over that she did not attend her prom that year. "I did not even dare to ask my coaches if I could go. They would have been like — 'Are you kidding?

Take time off for prom?'"

The hours of training, the buckets of sweat and tears of pain were eventually worth it when she qualified for the Olympics.

Interestingly, her friends knew she had made the cut before she did.

When the announcement was made, she was on a plane heading back after an event that would determine the Olympic qualification.

During the flight back to Singapore, she was depressed because she felt she had not done as well as she had expected.

"When I touched down, I got the message — 'Congrats' from one person. I thought, — 'Are you joking? Are you trying to mess with

me?' Then more messages came through, so I thought, 'Okay, I don't think it was a joke.'"

Even though the Olympics represents one of the highest levels of sporting excellence in the world, for Heem Wei, the event was less stressful than at other major events because the Olympic standard for gymnastics is stratospheric, and Singapore has yet to quite approach those levels. "You don’t get the pressure because you're not expected to medal. You're just going in and giving it your best shot." She finished 45th in the qualification round in London.

Even so, she still treasures her memory of her time in London.

"That would be the competition of my life." She said the significance of it all hit her as she was standing at the entrance of the stadium, just before marching in. "I looked out, and the spectators stand went up to the roof. It was super high and I thought, ‘Now I'm getting a bit scared.’"

After the Olympics, she participated in the 2014 Asian Games and the Commonwealth Games before announcing her retirement from the sport as an athlete. However, she is still deeply involved in the sport.

Image credit to Chris McGrath, Getty Images

In 2017, she returned to the SEA Games, this time as a judge.

Her current plans are to continue with the sport, probably on a management track rather than the coaching track. Her Degree in Business Administration from the National University of Singapore would help with that.

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Based on her life experience, she advises others to make sure they have no regrets about their decisions.

"You don't want to look back ten years from now, five years from now, and say 'what if I had...' because there is no 'what if' anymore.

By then, it's too late to say 'what if'".

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Since the middle of 2017, she has been working with the national association, Singapore Gymnastics, as a Sports Development Manager. The position is a new one for the association and her job is to help grow the sport. She says she took the job because she would have the ability to shape the direction and the policies for gymnastics in Singapore.

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Vanessa Harijanto

Courage under Fire

Vanessa Dewi Harijanto (SCGS: 1986 - 1995) teaches dance at SCGS and the job keeps her busy. She teaches the Royal Academy of Dance (RAD) classes in primary and secondary school, and coaches the members of the Dance of Co-Curricular Activity in secondary school.

While her work life now revolves around dance, this was not always the case. She only turned to dance after a near-death experience in Indonesia.

In 2003, Vanessa survived the suicide bombing at the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta. Twelve people died and 150 people were injured that day when a car bomb detonated outside the lobby of the hotel. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the act.

Courtesy of Vanessa Harijanto

When she was finally able to stagger to her feet, she was greeted by a scene of devastation: the restaurant, which seconds before had been filled with hungry diners, lay in ruins Vanessa was just starting her and people — dazed and bloody career in the food and beverage — were lying on the ground industry at the time. She had Degree in Business Administration groaning and screaming in pain. from the National University of With some help, Vanessa Singapore and had spent two stumbled out, blood dripping years with a consultancy focused off her. She had a bad cut on her on the hospitality and food and foot and had somehow lost her beverage industries. sandals amidst the chaos. Broken glass lay everywhere.

In early August, Vanessa and three colleagues visited Jakarta Outside the hotel, good as consultants to a company that Samaritans bundled the injured wanted to open a Ritz Carlton into passing cars and raced them Hotel in the city. The same to hospitals around the city. company owned the Marriott, The hospital, however, was only which was why the four of them able to provide a minor respite. were staying in the hotel.

Because of the sheer numbers of The Marriott bombing took victims, it was overwhelmed and place at lunch time on Tuesday, Vanessa recalls just waiting, her August 5. After a long morning eyelids growing heavy, still clad in in meetings, the group decided her bloody clothes, while people to grab a bite from the hotel’s around her were screaming in restaurant ahead of their flight pain and fear. back to Singapore later that day.

Vanessa had just started to tuck “I just remember being very cold.” in into her nasi goreng when a loud blast rocked the restaurant, knocking her off her seat.

The incident left both physical and mental scars, but she has overcome them to rebuild her life and move on.

Courtesy of SCGS

In the middle of the night, Vanessa and a few others were evacuated by air to Singapore and she was warded at the Singapore General Hospital (SGH).

She spent three weeks in SGH where the medical staff treated her third degree burns. She had to undergo operations to take skin from her legs to be grafted on her back, among other things.

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At the time, she did not realise she had been badly burnt.

She thought she just needed shrapnel removed from her. She only realised something was wrong when the nurses began exclaiming in horror as they peeled off her clothes.

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Initially, because of the grafts, she found that she could not move freely anymore. Her skin had lost its flexibility because of the scar tissue. “I couldn’t even spread my fingers.” Because she had been in bed for so long, she had to learn to walk again.

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The trauma Vanessa experienced was both physical and mental.

“The first time I started to get really scared was when I had to shower. I didn’t want to get myself wet. I don’t know why but I was just terrified.”

something I cared about. I didn’t feel the urgent need to get back into the rat race.”

Initially, she helped to conduct the research for the hospital’s medical social workers. The readings she had to do made her feel that she experience had been relatively easy compared to what others went through. While horrific, it had only left her with external injuries, she says. “It’s just superficial.”

That, however, was not entirely true. In addition to the physical wounds, there were mental ones as well. For a while, Vanessa Still, Vanessa says she got off could not face large crowds and lightly. While she was in SGH for three weeks, others stayed longer. flinched at loud noises. She stayed direction. That was when she away from balloons because the One of her colleagues had been turned to dance. electrocuted during the blast and prospect of them bursting filled her with anxiety. almost died as a result.

As a child, Vanessa had learned ballet at Palais Dance Studio At the same time, she did not After she was discharged from under its principal and founder, want to become a prisoner to hospital, she had to decide what Tan Eng Ai. One day after getting the past. She even went back to to do next. Her brush with death made her feel that she needed to Jakarta in November that year, just out of hospital, Vanessa decided to pay her old dance teacher a three months after the bombing, have meaning in her life. visit. While they were chatting, to attend the wedding of a the principal said to her, “Why not former classmate.

“You realise you need to come back to class?” do something because you believe in it, and not just go Eventually, she felt that she should get on with her life. While her old That was excatly what she did. along with the flow.” job at the consultancy was still open to her, she decided that her Part of the attraction of dance was She deliberately took time off that it would force her to move, to life needed to go in a different to find herself. “I wanted to do

Courtesy of Vanessa Harijanto

regain her flexibility, especially after her operations. She started slowly, first attending classes, then teaching a class, and later, expanding her scope. She obtained a teaching certificate from RAD, and then a degree in dance education from the University of Surrey. She did it all part-time so the whole process took about six years. With additional qualifications and experience, she started teaching more and dance began to occupy her life again.

In addition to dance, Vanessa’s personal life also began moving forward. She got married in 2010

Vanessa ended up teaching dance in SCGS purely by chance. Around 2014, Vanessa learnt of an opening, through one of the tailors who worked with the dance group at the school. She started teaching at the school and over time, her involvement has grown. Vanessa enjoys teaching dance at SCGS. As she says, “It’s nice to come back home.”

She has nothing but praise for the girls in dance. “The girls work hard.

We do demand a lot from them and they fulfil this expectations without complaint.”

The girls are aware of Vanessa’s history. The scars running down her arms are very obvious and she does not try to hide them. Some of the little ones even come up to her, poke her scars and go “Beep!

What’s that, Miss Vanessa?” It does not bother her at all.

She would much rather people ask her about it than just stare at her

and treat her like a specimen, which happened a lot in the early days.

Interestingly, Vanessa did not join dance as a student in SCGS. Instead, she was a Girl Guide and a Head Prefect in both primary and secondary school. Not doing dance in SCGS is one of the big regrets of her student life, she says.

One of the things she has taken away from her time in SCGS is something her Principal, Miss Rosalind Heng, said during one of her talks at assembly: That as individuals, the girls have a choice in how they respond to what happens to them. They could choose to be happy or they could choose to be angry.

“And she’s right,” says Vanessa.

“I can’t change how you think of me, how you perceive me.

And I can’t change what’s going on around me. But I can change how I want to do things on my end.”

Vanessa has chosen to not let the Marriott bombing define her. She’s chosen not to dwell on the events of 2003 but to move on. Otherwise, as she says, ”they get what they want.”

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and started a family. The horrific events of 2003 began to recede into the background. Today, she has even mostly gotten over the fear of balloons. As a mother of three young boys,it is difficult to excise balloons from her life.

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Gemma Rose Foo 94

A Dark Horse, but don’t bet against Her

Usually, when you fall off a horse, they tell you to get back in the saddle immediately. However when the fall results in a ruptured organ, that advice no longer applies.

It was in a stable in March 2016 when Gemma Rose Foo (SCGS: 2003 - 2008) fell off her horse and almost died. The paraequestrian was training for a competition in Cologne, Germany, when a loud noise startled her horse, Cassis Royal. He bolted and the sudden movement threw Gemma off the saddle.

Courtesy of Gemma Rose Foo

“They knew something was wrong because my face was white,” she recalls. Her spleen had ruptured because of the fall and she was experiencing massive internal bleeding, with the blood filling her abdomen.

She was rushed to hospital and ended up in intensive care for nine days. This was followed by another three months of recovering from the operation. Fortunately, doctors in Cologne managed to save her spleen and she still bears a 20 cm long scar on her abdomen from the operation.

The accident happened at an inopportune time for Gemma, who has cerebral palsy, and for

Singapore. She had spent four years Although she was a competitor preparing for the 2016 Paralympics at the Games, she was not at full strength. She had not fully and suddenly, all this was in doubt. recovered physically. In addition, the experience had scarred “I remember lying down in the her mentally. stretcher thinking, am I going to make it to Rio?” Doctors wanted “I had PTSD (post-traumatic stress her to rest for a minimum of three disorder) and anxiety. I kept getting months; the Paralympics was in September, some six months away. flashbacks. I kept thinking about the accident because it was so serious.”

“The doctors asked if I was sure I It took about a year to get over wanted to get back on the horse the fear and the flashbacks. Given as it post a very high risk. They cautioned me that it was crucial that that she had a mere three months of training before the Games and I not fall off the horse again.” that she was haunted by her nearHer mother was naturally worried fatal accident, the fact that she about her but Gemma was competed at all is a testimony to determined to compete: “Four her courage and determination. years of training; that’s a lot to throw away.” She spent two Gemma’s journey to Rio began months resting, and then started when she was eight. That was the physiotherapy. When she was age she began her therapy at the well enough, she got back on her Riding for the Disabled Association horse, and with just three months (RDA). Gemma has spastic diplegia of preparation, took part in the which means that she has difficulty Paralympic Games in moving all her limbs. This condition Rio de Janerio. was probably the result of being

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The fall was so bad that it broke her helmet and Gemma, then 20, lay on the ground, motionless and in shock. While she had fallen off her horse before, this time it was different.

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that, she continued her usual therapeutic riding sessions, but also began competing at the National Disability League, a riding competition for people with disabilities. This was her introduction to the sport of para-dressage.

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When she was 14, her competitive riding efforts were kicked up a notch she was talent spotted by Volker Eubel, the coach of the national para-equestrian team.

That year, she took part in her She would go on horseback twice first international competition in born prematurely. She was born Taiwan and was one of the top at 24 weeks rather than the full 40, a week. The therapy helped her riders. Two years later, in 2012, develop balance, coordination and weighed only 580 grams and also helped with her posture. she represented Singapore at birth. at the London Paralympics. In When she first started, she needed the process, she was one of Hippotherapy (after ‘hippos’, the the youngest Paralympians to Greek word for horse) is a form of volunteers helping her: one to represent the country. She lead the horse, and two others to physical therapy for people with took part in the para-dressage cerebral palsy. Gemma had always be on either side of the animal. event where she was classified After about two years, she was loved animals so she was thrilled Grade One, for the most able to ride independently, to be able to ride as part of which is a rare achievement. After severely disabled. her therapy.

While she did not win a medal in London, she enjoyed her time at the Games, meeting athletes from other sports. The Singapore team bonded together too. “I was just happy to be there.”

In addition to the Games, Gemma enjoyed being in London as she is a huge fan of Harry Potter. It was a treat to be in the same city that parts of the books were set in, and during her time off from training, she went on the Harry Potter studio tour and did some sightseeing as well.

Her love for Harry Potter began back in primary school.

“I brought lots of Harry Potter books for reading time during assembly,” she recalls.

Gemma attributes her love for reading and writing to her years in SCGS. She was the only student in school who was in the EM3 stream, so she had one-onone sessions with her teachers.

Courtesy of Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth

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“I became more confident, and would speak up more.”

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After leaving SCGS, Gemma went to CHIJ St Theresa’s Convent. She did her GCE N-Levels and then her GCE O-Levels there before enrolling at the Management Development Institute of Singapore (MDIS) to complete a Diploma course in Mass Communications with Oklahoma City University. She has since obtained her diploma and is now working towards her degree. She will graduate in 2019. Naturally, she is also focused on helping the Singapore para-dressage team qualify for the Tokyo Paralympics in 2020. This, too, requires sacrifice. In addition to the training (every day for at least half an hour), she and her family have to foot the financial cost of taking part in competitions.

have yet to qualify for the Tokyo Games, these competitions are self-funded. Each competition will set the rider back about €10,000 (about SGD15,400) because of the cost of airfare, transportation and stabling fees. Then there is the cost of paying the coach, the grooms (the stablehands who help ensure that the horses are ready and warmed-up during each competition) well as miscellaneous costs.

As much as she loves riding, she has another passion — writing.

Currently, she pens fiction and is a bit of a poet as well. She also writes book reviews and interviews authors for her blog.

During her six years in SCGS, Gemma was largely in the Sincerity class. Given the many obstacles she has had to overcome in her life, Courage would have been just All the qualifying competitions are as appropriate. in Europe and since the athletes

Source: The Straits Times © Singapore Press Holdings Limited. Reprinted with permission

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Courtesy of Julie Kwong-Lee

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Lim Phi-lan

Out of Suffering have emerged the Strongest Souls As a national athlete and as a person, Lim Phi-lan (SCGS: 1967 - 1970) has experienced huge setbacks in her life, but she has refused to yield to them. The former tennis prodigy saw her youthful ambitions to go professional flounder and she subsequently experienced two major breakdowns and yet, despite everything, she has never given up. She picked herself up, and painfully carried on.

Phi-lan is not a well known name today but in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she was the queen of Singapore tennis. She was regularly featured in the sports pages as she played in tennis tournaments around the region. She also represented Singapore in the sport, getting a silver at the SEA Games in the women’s singles in 1983. A very remarkable achievement it was, considering that it would take 34 years before another local woman would win a women’s singles medal in tennis at the SEA Games.

When she was in her teens, she made her SEA Games debut in tennis in the women’s singles and doubles. However, while she had started young, her foundations were shaky. Her father had been a badminton player who taught himself tennis from reading books written by tennis champions like Fred Perry and from looking at photographs. He coached her from what he learned in books as well, which was very limited at the time in capturing the mechanics of the sport.

In 1977, Margaret had come to Singapore to play some exhibition matches and Phi-lan had the chance to exchange a few strokes with her. “When I first sparred with Margaret Court, my racquet was almost blown off my hand just by the sheer velocity of her balls. When you play with the top players, you realise how big the gap is.”

During this time, however, she was able to improve her game significantly because she underwent major reconstruction of her foundations. It took her game to another level, but she was running against the clock.

After Phi-lan graduated from the In 1977, she was already 23. In University of Singapore later that year, she ventured to Australia, the comparison, that same year, a United States and England to see 21-year-old Björn Borg won the Wimbledon men’s singles title, if she had a future in competitive having won his first Grand Slam tennis in the international arena. tournament — the French Open — at the age of 18.

She attributed her early success in the game to sheer grit. “I would run down every ball,” she recalls. “I was called ‘The Wall’. I didn’t have any aggressive strokes, I was just huge on defence.”

Her distance from top level tennis was brought home when she sparred with Australian tennis legend Margaret Court, a former world number one player.

She found that she did not. She learned, among other things, that she did not have fast-twitch muscles, which is needed for success in games like tennis.

Courtesy of Lim Phi-lan

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Growing up, her focus was tennis.

Her father had represented Singapore in tennis and through his influence, patience and encouragement, she picked up the game as a young girl. “When I was young, I had dreams of playing in Wimbledon,” she recalls.

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Phi-lan returned to Singapore in 1978 and continued playing competitively in various regional tournaments while earning a living as a tennis coach. The pinnacle of her tennis career was winning the women’s singles silver SEA Games medal at the age of 29 in 1983.

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It was in her quest for excellence in her game, titles and wins that she put herself through a punishing regime that eventually wrecked her knees. In the year preparing for the 1983 SEA Games, “I would train three hours in the morning, then I would coach in the afternoon, then train for two hours, then go for a six to eight km run.”

After giving up coaching, Phi-lan served in a ministry called The Christian Library, doing administrative work and helping to source for resources like books and tapes until 1996.

Her mother had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the same motor neurone disease that struck theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, in the early 1990s and Phi-lan was helping to take care of her.

However, in October 1996, Phi-lan had a feeling, what she felt to be a prompting from God, to stop work and be with her mother fulltime. Her mother passed away in December that year.

Eventually, because of the pain, Phi-lan finally gave up, first playing, then coaching, in the early 1990s. In the next phase of her life, she turned from serving forehands to serving God. She had actually not been particularly religious growing up. It was really only during her tumultuous late teen years that she began to turn to God. Courtesy of SCGS

She had just had a quick dinner with a friend and was returning to the family home in East Coast.

Outside the house however, she found she couldn’t proceed any further.

“I was just sitting outside the gate.

I couldn’t go inside. I was afraid of seeing mum.

Phi-lan describes the last few months with her mother as a “precious” time. “I did see that the Lord was walking with mum through all our struggles.”

During that period, Phi-lan and her mother were drawn closer.

“Relations were mended, healed, becoming more whole. We were learning to love, to be loved, and letting go.”

After her mother passed away, Phi-lan joined an organisation called Youth With A Mission (YWAM). That was also when she began to open up her home to visiting missionaries.

Her association with YWAM actually began in the early 1990s, soon after her mother was diagnosed with ALS. It was 1993 and because of the stress of caring for her mother, Phi-lan suffered her first nervous breakdown.

A few days later, the same feeling of dread and paralysis seized her while she was at work. She was unable to make herself leave to go home. She called her best friend, crying. The friend was with a missionary friend at the time, and the two of them came to her rescue immediately.

They helped Phi-lan process what she was going through. She stayed with a missionary family, receiving counsel and rest for a

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Courtesy of SCGS

“I realised I was melting down.

Mum was my sole responsibility. I had to be everything to her. I tried to be everything and that was killing me.”

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while before being able to return to care for her mother.

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This was Phi-lan’s introduction to YWAM and after her mother passed away, she went through discipleship training and served in that organisation, which was set up to help train Christian missionaries.

Singapore is a restful stopover for missionaries in Asia who come for medical reasons, a visa run or just a break. However, Singapore is an expensive place to have a stopover and Phi-lan figured she could help in this area by opening up her home to visiting missionaries.

With help from an architect friend some alterations to were made to the second floor to create a selfcontained unit which served as space for them.

“Hospitality has been a way of my life since that time.”

Even after she sold that house and moved into a condo, she

continued the practice of opening disconnected and discouraged.

It was a bleak period for her. To her home to missionaries. occupy herself, she would cycle to Changi Village and back home Phi-lan also served in YWAM every day from Monday to Friday, as a teacher and by supporting a distance of just over 40km. “I missionaries in the field in Asia would cycle myself to exhaustion. by delivering resources, such as required supplies to them. In Her despair was expressed in addition, she was also a listening prayers struggling to re-connect ear to them. with God and over the course of a year, bit by bit, she regained However, the stress of sharing that connection and reset her their problems caused a burnout focus. That strengthened her that led to her second nervous faith and brought her the healing breakdown in 2007, more than a she needed. decade after her first.

“I didn’t know I had to tend to myself and I was fully consumed with the care of others. I was trying to do everything” and she felt spiritually dried out.

After she recovered, she moved on to facilitate prayer in YWAM. Subsequently she was invited to join another prayer initiative and left YWAM in 2012.

During her second meltdown, she was unable to function. “I felt disappointed with myself. I was shocked at my own condition. I was in a daze.”

Her life now is very different from her secondary school years, which she describes as a lot of carefree fun.

Phi-lan felt that she was serving but not connecting with God. She felt spiritually empty,

She represented SCGS in tennis even though the school at Emerald Hill didn’t have a tennis court and also swam for

the school. She was part of the inaugural National Cadet Corps of the school and the first to become a Warrant Officer with the rank of Company Sergeant Major. In her final year she won the Cadet of the Year award. Highlights of her time with the NCC included the brilliant silent drill which elicited Minister Lim Kim San’s comment that the school had a better army than he did.

‘Naughty’ is not a word one would ascribe to her now. When looking at the arc of her life, more appropriate words that spring to mind would be ‘sincerity’, ‘generosity’ and ‘service’. And perhaps, above all else, ‘courage’.

Courage to stand up, after having fallen badly. Courage to recover from devastating setbacks and to find the will to move on.

She recalls: “We were a naughty bunch but naughty in a good way.”

Courtesy of SCGS

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