I saw my children yesterday.
Rather, they are not mine, but they mean the most to me.

At the end of camp last year, I thought that I could do more for you. I would go see you in your home as soon as possible, so that you wouldn't have to miss us so much.

Yesterday I realised that there is still nothing much I can do. I can't talk to each of you personally, or hold your hand all day, and tell you that you are special and I missed you. There are too many of you. What you want is personal attention, that affirmation that you are one of a kind, and I can't give that to you. I can only afford to buy presents for you in bulk, and give out attention in bulk. I can only see a little bit of you, and give a little of myself for one morning at a time. Then I have to leave, and you have to go back to your own complicated, confusing life, going home for the weekend or not at all, sleeping in your dormitory bed with your one cupboard.

I wish I could say, "You mean a lot to me," but I have nothing to back that up. I can only give you a temporary escape from the routine. And perhaps that is all you want of me too. The workers who live with you love you the most, but because they do the difficult things like enforcing rules and order, you like them less. So my superficial role is also the most ideal.

So I'm keeping my reality glasses on. And I'll do my best to show you that I love you in the next few hours we have together. Which will be in four weeks' time--which in your world, is a very short time away to see someone you care about.

RFKC HK'11.

The camp that had us all in wigs at some point of time. No photographs of the children to show, except for kids of the staff. Lucky me got to be one of the photographers of the trip. Photos of me are by Nicole or Shian Wen.

So this was my 8th camp, and my most relaxed. Apart from taking photographs, I planned birthday party games and the chapel decor.

Every role in camp feels different. Counsellors are the most emotionally invested, because they give the most of themselves to that two children for a week. They start to snap by Day 2, and by Day 5 are giving out of emptiness. But that's how gold is purified by fire.

As mainly an observer this camp, I could see all the other nuances that they in their tiredness wouldn't have been able to see: fatherless boys hugging their newly found father figures in camp, kids going into hyperactive overdrive because they are just really really happy, the sense of loss after camp for kids who go home to kick stones at a traffic junction after school.

And so the little tasks I had to do were never so important as they were this week. Such as cutting up pork fillets for a tableful of boys, stirring up Pocari sweat into mini cups, or just drawing animals to fill the chapel. There are many big tasks I often do in my daily life that end up being in vain. None are as rewarding as the little things I did last week at camp.

Camp was at Noah's Ark in HK. Built to exact size and perched on the beach, but alas, this is the only part of the premises that had animals in it. And they were too faraway to climb on. But in a symbollic way it was our ark, a safe place to hide for a week, away from the rest of HongKong.

Disneyland sponsored us a day's trip, and I was one of the blessed volunteers who got to go.

You know, summer in HK is an awful time to be in hour-long queues, amidst locals who push their way past you and glare when told off. But the children were amazingly patient, never complaining once about the wait or the rude patrons. So I learnt to hold my tongue and tried not to pollute their patient hearts.

And after the heat and the wait and rudeness, Disneyland is really worth it after all. This Spinning Teacup ride looked kiddy enough to give a miss, but made us so dizzy at the first spin that one minute of it was more than enough. And the Philharmagic 4D show, with visits to Ariel's cave, Aladdin's flying carpet and the Lion King? I teared because Disney Magic had finally done me in.

Of course the children were very happy at Disneyland. They didn't even clamour for us to buy them souvenirs, or fight over which ride to take. But it wasn't just about Disney magic. Throughout the camp, whether it was a simple ball game or prizes of stickers, they were endlessly happy. They were the easiest group of children to placate or persuade. From an outsider's view it would seem they have perfectly contented lives. But we know that is not the case. Their gratitude makes me want to do anything for them.

One more camp to do in Singapore this December. My 9th. Will it be your first?

___________

Royal Family Kids' Camp is a camp for abused and neglected children.

When we do camp, who do we really do it for?

The children? We are not their saviours. We can only be there for five days, and by the sixth day we close our hearts again and run back to our bustling Christmases. The children become stories--and if they should try to follow us back into our daily lives, we would not be large enough to bear that responsibility.

Our leaders and coworkers? We are all walking on different paths towards the same guiding star. But on our individual paths, there will be obstacles that only we see and only we can deal with. And on their paths, there will be obstacles only they can see. Some coworkers choose never to come back to camp, but we stay on without them.

I thought I was doing camp for the children. Then I thought I was doing camp for the volunteers. And at times, I thought I was doing camp for RFKC itself, which is such a wonderful concept that it had to be materialized whenever possible.

But no, this year I realized the only person I can do camp for is God. Because when nobody was sure about camp, and when there was absolutely no money to run camp, I had One Thing to hold on to for dear life. I had God's endorsement.

So God, now that I've sorted out who I do camp for, You tell me what's next.

Kids' camp year is over.
On the last day of camp, a few of us travelled back on the bus to the MCYS building with the children, and watched foster parents and group homes come to receive them in trickles. Some parents and homes were late, and the children had to wait. Then I returned to Sentosa where the rest of the volunteers were already having their Welcome Home lunch in loud, festive joy. I sat down with my plate and couldn't really articulate myself, or ease myself into their joy. At night I cried until my eyes were swollen.

This chunk of five days has been more than a week. It has been a year of RFKC. It has been a year of training, meetings, prayers, and hoping. Reading the children's profiles, interviewing volunteers, crossing out things on a long list of to-dos, counting how much money we had left to raise, struggling one month before camp to decide whether to continue on with camp.

It has also been one year of abundance. This whole year, I have never felt like I'm doing this alone, or that I'm too young, or too tired, or sick of camp. And I never ever felt that we had not enough resources to complete it. God provided every day. It was a year of fullness.

So when camp was over, that year of fullness was emptied in one afternoon, and I died for a little while. I thought of children who had really appreciated that there was camp this year, and I also thought of the children who were too self-protective to appreciate anyone or anything fully. I thought of the volunteers who had been strong and loving, and I also thought of the volunteers who had nothing left in their hearts to give anymore. I thought of the miracles like the sun shining every single day, and I also thought of all the man-made mistakes.

Most of all I felt the weariness of all fifty volunteers upon me. Volunteers often expect gratitude expressed from the children, because they have a preconceived notion of what a victim is. We don't realise that victims can be manipulative, insecure, or hurt us back. We don't realise that many children are so deep in their own hurt right now that they cannot rise above it and understand what we have given. Someday they might, but not right now.

On the way back to MCYS, a child asked me how much camp had cost. "They say it's a few thousand, is it?" And I just said yes. I couldn't tell her how much people had given, because that would spoil it somehow.

We too cannot keep thinking about what we have given. That will spoil it all.

Saturday: 16% of budget

Sunday: 50% of budget

Today: 90% of budget!!!!!!!!!

Praise God, He wants camp to happen!

38 kids will be very happy next week!

And everything is turning out fiiiine.

And I don't think I've ever used so many exclamation marks in a written piece.

I know too that money is the very least of problems.

We must not neglect to pray for the bigger things.

 

(photo: from transcool tokyo exhibition couple weeks ago)

Feeling a bit helpless now as the kids' camp pulls into the station, and I'm still straddled on the train track watching it come.

Last week I taught some brand new volunteers the basics of RFKC- the same stuff that started me on this journey five years ago. I might love RFKC a bit too much. I'm so afraid that if I want this too much, I will crush it.

So I'm staring at the schedule I've drafted for one week of camp, wishing there was more space in each excel spreadsheet cell to scribble notes, wondering if we will have money to make each timetable cell come to life.

We can plan all we want, be motivated all we want, but God still sails this ship.

Do you know what has kept me going this whole year? The memory of C crying one year ago on the last day of camp, and telling me she didn't want to leave the children's home to go back to her natural family because that would mean she can't come for RFKC anymore. 

What is this camp, what is so great about it? The kids just sing songs, pick at their food, run around, line up for showers, play games. The first time I volunteered, I was so tired the first day that I couldn't believe there were four more days to go. I counted down every day with increasing glee. And then the last day came, and I found my kids crying because they didn't want to go back to where they'd come from.

The little we give is ten thousand times greater in their eyes. So I must go back, I must make camp happen for them. That is all that drives me. But God, do you want a greater motivation from me than that?

I find myself talking about kids all the time now. They say the funniest things to me. I wouldn't have imagined myself talking about kids, not in a million years. But it seems that it has panned out that way. Here are some soundbites, from camp and malaysia:

CAMP

me: So wet! It's so drenched!
kid: (eyes me for a few seconds) How do you learn your English?
--
Kid 1: (to poor volunteer) Why do you have red hair? (vindictively) Maybe you want a new boyfriend and you want to attract your new boyfriend.
Kid 2: (nodding seriously) Yah maybe.
--
Kid: I wish camp was six days, not five days. No, I wish it was one week. No, two weeks. Not more than two weeks because then we will have to wash our own clothes.
--
Kid 1: (to me) Gabriella (from High School Musical) is very vain in real life.
Me: How do you know?
Kid 1: You see (shows me photo of Vanessa Hudgens in a low-cut evening gown at a premiere) SO vain! (passes to Kid 2)
Kid 2: (pores over photo) I didn't know she was so vain.

IN THE CAR TO AND FROM M'SIA

kid: I was so cute last time! I wish I could see myself!
--
kid: I like my face in future, because some women have the bone (cheekbone).
--
Mother: They say God loves everyone except Mas Selamat.
Kid 1: Except Mas Selamat and Satan.
Kid 2: I've never seen him you know.
Kid 1: I've never seen him too.
Kid 2: Because there are 3 of them! So how am I supposed to know which one is Satan?
Me: Satan's not human!
Kid 2: He's not a human?! Then what is he? An ... animal?

Back from camp and I realize that my days as a "jie jie" are numbered. I can only keep doing these kids' camps as a full-time counselor now, when I'm not tied to my own baby or too old to be called a jie jie.

My parents had enough foresight to help me request more leave so I can take a few days' rest in Malaysia. I hope to lounge in white sheets for hours, paint my nails, watch DVDs, swim, and put masks on. Also I will download all the stuff that's been sifting in my brain.

It's not so hard to recover physically from camp. But emotionally it's difficult because I am bursting with stories to tell but not everyone wants to hear them. There is much life and much buzz in the world beyond my kids' camps. So I shall just keep writing the stories on a-part, which has gathered a surprising audience here (facebook page). There are people from France who are reading, people I would never have known in my lifetime. I set up the page for my friends who have been supporting me in the camps. But now it has drawn people who, I suppose, are interested to know more about this hidden quadrant of the earth, who are possibly keen on investing their time to help the children too. God bless all of you.

It's kids' camp time again. I never say enough about it here as I should. I usually come back from camp too emotionally exhausted to rehash it in words. Instead I unloaded all my experiences into my final year project, spending a year on it. But from now on there shall be a home just for kids' camp stories:

set apart. be a-part of this. be a-part-ner. (click for link)

because i do want to share everything, including the experience of giving.

My group of fifteen-year-olds in church meet in a kindergarten classroom. Sometimes we see strange art pieces done by the kids all strung up above us. Like drawings of big heads and doctors, unanimously telling the story of a certain Nellie who had gotten her finger stuck in her nose. But these papers stuck on a cupboard were very sweet:







The last one was from a bunch of "Letters from Friends" and it reads very solemnly: "Dear Charles, I agree I'm still your friend. Even though it will be difficult to see each other. Your friend Benjamin."

Reminds me of a letter I wrote in imaginary despair and loneliness to my imaginary husband on his imaginary journey when I was 5: "Dear (stuffy British name that I can't remember), it's impossible."

I've been a ball of restlessness thinking about all the things I could do. Shopkeep, draw, get a graphic design job that ends at 9 pm earliest, enter competitions, make books, send out portfolios.

Bong: "Have fun planning your life..but actually there's only so much you can plan."

How true, for nothing about the following picture was planned, or even expected. Tell me a year ago that we would be there and I wouldn't have had the faith to believe it. It wouldn't even have been anything I'd have asked for. So right now, I'll just have to go along with the right thing one step at a time, and I'll find myself in lavender fields.

I wish I could show you everything from Japan, especially the children. But this is a special camp, and these are special children. So here are a couple of photos from each city, essence photos.


Hakodate: The mountains, the mist, the grass. The grass that Rachel and I rolled in because it was lush and inviting. The children were happy catching insects and the adults were happy being out of the city.

Suika, watermelon. We received six watermelons and had to give them away. All the fresh produce: morning market sashimi, potato-picking, butter-making, ice-cream making, white corn.

Hanabi, fireworks. This was the last night, Everybody's Birthday. The children didn't seem too impressed with our birthday party, but their eyes were glued to the cake when it came all ablaze with candles. Then we set off summer fireworks in the courtyard and played with sparklers till we were too full of them.
As photographer of the camp, I was able to capture all the little moments that I had never been able to in previous camps. Camps are strictly no-camera. After this though, I will have to delete all the photos with the children's faces. But I will never forget their faces or names. I wonder how they will fare, if they will be stronger, if they will remember that they can always call on their Best Friend to help them.


Then we moved on for our prayer walk, which was more of a blessing tour of Hokkaido.

Noboribetsu: Hell Valley, sulphur hot springs

and a ghost town ruled by a demon figure
our banquet dinner wearing yukata

Lake Toya
Farm Tomita, lavender

And the mascot of my entire trip: Marimo! Glorified Hokkaido moss balls.

So much to be thankful for. More photos some other time.

I'm leaving. Human beings constantly build their lives around things, and everything is important: family, pets, gardens, work, good food. But if they are really blessed, they will also find something extra to live for. I'm blessed, because I have found that something extra.

If I had never heard about the royal family kids' camp and child abuse, I would be a different person today. My final year project would have been about something else, possibly music, possibly something dark. I would not have taken japanese last semester, because I would not be going to hokkaido today. I would not have learnt to appreciate the good family I have.

But as it is, I am stuck forever to this cause that I have found. I don't even remember when I started aiming to go for the kids camp in hokkaido. It must have been eight months ago. But because it was all meant to be, the money was raised, the language was learnt, and things fell into place (not easily) this month.

I can't wait to meet the children, to see the faces that God must love so very much, to make us go against the odds to be with.

so S said, but she could remember this:
"for i know the plans i have for you," says the Lord,
"plans for good and not for disaster,
to give you a future and a hope."

And so she has remembered what's important. Still with hair in her eyes and a lot of attitude.

And T was there, taller but tamer, eyes still drifting up softly. I heard from A that she likes a boy and he likes her back. I think she will turn out just fine. Knowing that makes me very comforted, because two years ago I let her insecure tangled mass go up the bus with knotfuls of worry.

I saw LH too, still verbally ineloquent, but affectionate with her smiles.

They will all turn out fine. My heart is full and yellow.

---

We kayaked and made rafts within the dotted lines of white balls. The water was reservoir water and it tasted of nothing. The children had more fun capsizing the kayaks and bobbing in the water while adults tried to pull them up. I sat on the jetty with A and the fifteen-year-olds and wondered what it must be like to enter a home at the age of fourteen.

The boys were tiny, as tiny as I thought they had been years ago. But the angry ones were smiling and asking for second hamburgers, with ketchup over cheeks that I thought was too cute to wipe away.

I asked about all the children I knew, and from snippets I have a picture in my mind of everyone being a family that learns to look out for each other.

---

So this valentine's day was, as t.rex says, "like a ball of love."

Yesterday my father bought me a pair of running shoes, which are actually the first I've had in my life. I've always had the kind of school shoes that can't do much. I like to run because all too often I sit in too stagnant a solitude, and running puts the scenery in my control again.

The children, reservoir water, the shoes.

All these random elements, strung together loosely by what we call chronological time, are fitting together like missing pieces that I've been looking for. I feel ready to run.

On Sundays I see very little of the friends my age, but I see a lot of these pretty 14-year-olds going on fifteen.

They can be happy just sitting on a parallel bar. Being with them makes me happy, because they are in no hurry to grow up. Sometimes I want to be as grey and complicated as I can be, but then I see them and I want to live a good life and be a good person for them.

We had a picnic today under a blazing sky, and as usual I was wearing too many layers. Sarah (co-teacher) made hearts to stick into the chicken nuggets.

"I love this house! It looks like a fireman's house!"

And because it is just too hot to do anything, I want to share these things I stole off other people's websites:

from joanne

That's all. I wish I could disappear for just a little while more.

I'm supposed to be doing research on orphans and abuse. This is to be the one big thing I leave school with, the year-long project, my great work.

But I can't bring myself to look for orphans to feed my opus. The more I think about them, the more I disgust myself with how we have come to need the needy. We need them to feel charitable, to feel compassionate, to feel bigger than we are on small-minded days. We need them to satisfy our yearly requirement of good works. Take them away and we too disappear into the crowd. Equality is no fun for the hero.

I have six days to compile a journal of research. Three months' worth of work to be done in a week, and I can't even get past the first thought on this.

-

We watched the milky sky turn white with ax-wielding clouds, lying on the narrow picnic mat on everybody's favorite hill. Then another wind came and the sky was dark again, and the girls were singing yet another random obscure song, and all I could think of was how blank my mind was. How blank, as if insulated and taped up so nothing can get in.

.

.
Boys.

I must have registered myself for Toby Huynh's fan club, because I get regular photos of him by email. Here he sings a song from Mulan. If you can't hear it: "Why do you give me daughters when I ask for sons!" I sent over some stickers from the art camp to make sure he doesn't forget me.

And below: Nathanael from Beijing. I seem to get along best with tyrannous two-year-old men who say, "carry me!" I gave him one and a half holga rolls to play with and taught him how to manipulate the color flash. "Stand by the fridge!" "Stand there!" "Hold the tar (car)!" He's a pretty good photographer already.







My mother and I agree that they like me because I take them seriously. At the art camp there was this little man:
and he told me one day with earnest eyes blinking, "I have to go for a meeting! A small one." And sometimes he would rush off and tell me, "I have to go to work."
"Alright," I'd say, and watch him run off to tap on the toy laptop.

Maybe because I hated being talked down to as a child. When asked "who's your very bessstt friend in school?" I said straight, "You wouldn't know her."

I was so tired over the weekend. But look at that, and that, and that. Silly me always looks at the imperfections, when there is so much joy around. So I had a twelve-hour sleep and woke up with a burst of energy, washing and tossing things without mercy.

While spring cleaning I found a ghastly number of eyeshadow pots in my drawers. Ghastly because I don't wear any colour except black and brown. I finally found the courage to dump all my lipglosses though. Only one thing from my past I'll keep: a bottle of the Body Shop's Virtual Cherry perfume that I haven't been able to let go of for seven years. There're only a few drops of it in there, but I swear it's the scent of my life. That's why I took Nina Ricci's Cherry Fantasy from sharon. It's still not quite the same but it'll get there. I'm keeping Virtual Cherry for another seven years. Some part of me is still fifteen.

So this is what it's like to be free. I spent the last couple of days at home like a goldfish, being contented to swim around my aquatic plants and little stone castle. Then there was the playground and red-haired hamish and alex who hijacked my camera and overexposed all the shots, how i love boisterous children. And today walking starry-eyed through bugis because I haven't done crammed shopping in months. Crammed shopping being different from spacious shopping; crammed shopping means rows and piles and stacks of cheap things and mazes of alleys and different music clashing in two square metres of space. I love crammed shopping.

And dinner at newton on a whim, and the mysterious table of bald Japanese men and Singaporean (haired) host who drank a crate of beer. My mother and I spent the whole dinner speculating what they could possibly be. We ruled out dancers and acrobats because a couple of them were flabby. Probably musicians because they're a mix of old and young. Bald because they're a drum troupe? Not cancer patients because they were drinking and as I said, a couple were flabby. Also highly likely that they're human sculptures and have to be covered in body paint. My mother thought they might have just shaved their heads to donate hair for cancer patients, but I don't think men's hair would make much of a wig. How I wanted to go across and ask, "Hi, why are you all bald?"

And a new kd to keep my nights occupied in the geekiest way possible. Staying home isn't half bad. Tomorrow will be a garden day, a quietening down before mongolia. I'm all for rainbows tonight.