Delivering blessings

A young girl finds her pas­sion col­lect­ing clothes and toys for the needy.

By CAN­DICE NEO

What started with a sim­ple Christ­mas project has blos­somed into a sub­stan­tial ini­tia­tive that extends to many under­priv­i­leged chil­dren in Asia.

Emily Teng of Bless­ings in a Bag (BIAB) – a non-​profit ini­tia­tive that works with com­mu­ni­ties, orphan­ages and homes region­ally – had orig­i­nally wanted to inspire her friends to give back to the com­mu­nity dur­ing the fes­tive sea­son. She felt that many of her friends focused too much on the “mate­r­ial things” in their lives, and wanted to get them to start think­ing about “causes that were greater than that”.

In the months lead­ing up to Christ­mas 2007, Emily requested dona­tions of unwanted (but still usable and rel­a­tively new) clothes from her peers on Face­book and MySpace, with the inten­tion of ship­ping the items to needy com­mu­ni­ties in Asia. Two weeks later, she was met with an over­whelm­ing response.

“Peo­ple were just drop­ping things off at my home lobby … and my wardrobe was flooded with items,” said the 24-​year-​old. The dona­tions even spilled into her liv­ing room!

At that time, she never thought twice about the costs that her project could incur; she was more focused on reach­ing the goal of help­ing the chil­dren. Her first ship­ment of about five boxes to char­ity in the Philip­pines, Tiwala Kids and Com­mu­ni­ties, came to S$200.

How it works

Today, equipped with a for­mal NGO, a team of five other vol­un­teer youths and, albeit, a lot more savvier, Emily is still col­lect­ing and pack­ing clothes, toys and sta­tionery for chil­dren in Cam­bo­dia, Philip­pines and other coun­tries in South­east Asia. She has set up col­lec­tion points at *Scape Youth Park and other loca­tions that she adver­tises through the BIAB Face­book page.

To dis­trib­ute the items, the BIAB move­ment encour­ages peo­ple to bring dona­tions in their lug­gage when they travel to coun­tries with selected char­ity groups. These char­i­ties are either rec­om­mended by vol­un­teers, or those that Emily has per­son­ally vis­ited, or have kept in touch with over the years. In return, the vol­un­teers have to take pho­tos of their inter­ac­tions with the com­mu­nity with which they leave the donations.

Emily also works with cor­po­ra­tions – includ­ing the TUV SUD, a ser­vice provider of prod­uct test­ing ser­vices, and Sin­ga­pore Air­lines 5Cs – to sup­ply dona­tions as well as to dis­trib­ute goods overseas.

For the most part, how­ever, she pays for the ship­ping expenses out of her own pocket – using her salary from her full-​time job as a DJ at Power 98 FM – as well as occa­sional finan­cial sup­port from her team­mates, friends and fam­ily mem­bers. These expenses vary from month to month, depend­ing on the amount of dona­tions received and requests from the dif­fer­ent non-​profits, but can cost any­where from S$200 to S$5,000. Dis­tri­b­u­tion still remains BIAB’s largest cost.

Beyond her own expenses, Emily also puts in a lot of her own per­sonal time into BIAB. On an aver­age, she spends around four to five hours a day on her cause and finds bal­anc­ing her work as a DJ and BIAB chal­leng­ing. “You just have to pri­ori­tise your time espe­cially on things that you care about,” she said.

Not just chil­dren

Besides chil­dren, Emily also reaches out to impov­er­ished women. She is cur­rently work­ing with OKRA, a project that enables women from rural loca­tions in Cam­bo­dia and Philip­pines to earn an income by hand­mak­ing stuffed toys and colour­ful bags using recy­clable mate­ri­als. Emily buys the prod­ucts from them and sells them in shops in Sin­ga­pore includ­ing Friends at Haji Lane and Wood Wood at Far East Plaza. She also sells the prod­ucts at var­i­ous events that BIAB vol­un­teers attend. For each of the items, the women can earn around US$8 (S$10.34) to US$10 ($12.93).

In 2007, Emily launched the OKRA ini­tia­tive after a trip to the Philip­pines dur­ing which she noticed women col­lect­ing trash to make and sell var­i­ous items in their rural com­mu­ni­ties. “The prod­ucts were still seen as trash and no one was buy­ing them,” she said. She decided to teach the women to improve their prod­ucts and hence, started up the OKRA project. She now works with six groups of women con­sist­ing of eight to 10 women each group.

Hav­ing empa­thy for the needy

Despite hav­ing come from a well-​to-​do fam­ily in Jakarta, Emily has long had an affin­ity to help the needy. She first realised the impor­tance of giv­ing back to soci­ety – to the needy – when she was eight. She was already con­scious of the under­priv­i­leged; she was con­fronted with scenes of slums and chil­dren on the streets when­ever her fam­ily drove out of their wealthy neigh­bour­hood in Jakarta.

But one par­tic­u­lar inci­dent left an impres­sion on her. She recalls the day when her mother sud­denly told her to pack her old clothes and toys and, together, they brought the items to their housekeeper’s res­i­dence in the slum area. “I still remem­ber her daugh­ter was the same age as I was, but she had noth­ing, and was just play­ing with dirt,” Emily remembers.

With that image imprinted in her mind, Emily nat­u­rally became an active giver. Over the years, she has been a vol­un­teer at retiree homes, a hos­pice, and child­care centres.

She hopes that in addi­tion to her giv­ing and her work with BIAB, she can inspire other youths to vol­un­teer and con­tribute back to soci­ety. “It’s impor­tant that they know they can make a dif­fer­ence, and they get to know their own strength and how they can help peo­ple,” she said. “They just need to donate what they have – time, pas­sion, and a heart will­ing to help out.”

She is also in the midst of start­ing yet another BIAB ini­tia­tive – Project World­ChangeAgent, which aims to encour­age sec­ondary school stu­dents to develop ideas to solve real-​world prob­lems today. The win­ning teams, which will be selected in August 2012, would get an all-​expense-​paid trip to the coun­try on which they are work­ing to carry out their ideas. The BIAB team is cur­rently look­ing for spon­sors for this project.

It is two months before Christ­mas and Emily is busy again with donated items includ­ing toys that need to get shipped out before year-​end and the many projects on which she is work­ing. What keeps her going is the thought that one of those toys will light up a child’s face and the bed­clothes will keep a fam­ily warm. These are her bless­ings to the world.