NUS Volunteering Action Committee

In late 2015, I signed up as a volunteer for NVAC@NUH, an initiative where you would go into hospital wards at NUH and interact with the patients there, befriending and engaging with them. After a training session by NVAC, where they taught us the basics on how to approach patients and what to talk about, we were ready to volunteer.

Singapore has an ageing population; oftentimes, the elderly are left behind, without anybody to care for them, and as a result, most of the patients in long-term palliative care wards are those who don’t have any relatives to visit them or support them.

Volunteering here was challenging; there were some practical issues, like language barriers (a lot of the elderly didn’t know English, while I didn’t know Mandarin), some patients were unable/unwilling to talk. A lot of them also faced chronic or life-threatening conditions.

I would talk to folks in these wards for 2 hours every 2 weeks. Sometimes, I would find the same patient, who would say ‘Hi’ to me. Sometimes, when I went to the ward next week, I wouldn’t find the patient I had spoken to the week before; a lot of them passed away.

The volunteering was definitely emotionally draining. Around week 6, I considered quitting.

However, one day, I talked to an Indian doctor who had recently undergone brain surgery - we bonded over being from the same city in India, growing up in the same city our entire lives, and moving to Singapore recently. He hadn’t told his family back home about undergoing this surgery, as they would be worried needlessly. He had arrived in SG just over a month ago, so he knew very few people. I sat there, and we talked for the whole 2 hours; towards the end, he mentioned how he had no visitors and how our conversation made his day. I continued volunteering.

This experience was definitely an eye-opening one for me; just 2 hours of my time, and I could actually make somebody’s day better. It reaffirmed why I signed up for this in the first place. I pressed on, and continued interacting with folks in this ward - I saw my parents/grandparents in these patients, and even though I was saddened by the fact that they were suffering, I hoped to be able to provide some support and comfort to them in their tough times.

Even though I don’t remember his name anymore, I hope the doctor is ok. And I really hope all the folks in these are happy and not in pain anymore, wherever they are.