5 Lessons to change the world

Huishan is an educator in practice and linguist at heart. She is passionate about environmental issues, and believes strongly that there is there is something intrinsically wrong with excess. Together with two friends, she founded Save That Pen, a socio-environmental initiative that aims to spread the message of sustainability in our everyday lives. She hopes to save enough pens one day to build a livable house of pens that will, obviously, last forever.

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It started with a simple question three years ago in a small university room—why do people throw pens away without thinking, almost heartlessly? It was a discussion that got serious, passionate and eventually turned into action. Save That Pen was founded in the Fall of 2009 and the rest, they say, is timelined on a Facebook wall.

From a simple student-initiated project, we grew to fit a growing local environmentalist agenda. These days, we are working to bring the message of sustainability to schools in Singapore by saving pens.  Through the journey, the lessons I’ve learnt were countless; the last three years of operation have brought insight beyond pens and about life.

These are 5 lessons I think anyone who wants to change the world should know.

1.    Think big, work small

The ideas that change the world are ultimately big ideas. But operationalizing big ideas can eat.you.up. From the start, the project has never been about pens. We founded the organization because we wanted to make a statement about waste and consumption in this society. People don’t know (or care) enough about the subversive sentiments that drove the conceptualization of this project but it started simply—we didn’t like the society we lived in and we sought to change it. Three wide-eyed undergraduate girls thought we would start small and concentrate on the weapon of the educated. We founded Save That Pen with a focus on environmental education—if one can start by contemplating their stance towards a pen, perhaps they can start applying that to other things in their life—paper, water, power, branded bags, the big car.

2.    Expect criticism and welcome it

It’s always been easier to criticize than be encouraging, and you’ll have to understand that haters are going to hate. Forever. It was not easy starting a project such as this in an institution of higher education where criticism is central to its function. People were constantly questioning us “why pens?” and we even got an email once from a professor who noted that while he did not support a “Save That Pen” campaign, he would gladly support a “Save That Penis” campaign. He said, and I quote: “Anyone who persuades himself that saving a ball point pen is a meaningful contribution to preserving the world from global warming is deluding himself. Isn’t this mere posturing?”

Perhaps. But while this comment stems from a decontextualized understanding of the project, criticisms like these allow us chances to refine our rhetoric, reframe our arguments and reaffirm our belief. So welcome criticism, and see it as a chance to better the articulation of your aims.

3. Believe in the good of people

Cynical people exist in this world, and good people do too. Over the years, we’ve had overwhelming support from strangers and friends alike. The support came from unexpected places—the auntie from the heartland who came to deposit a bag of pens she saved from the spring cleaning of 2012, the directors of MNCs and environmental corporations who offered their valuable advice as well as little children who light up at the sight of an old purple pen. When the Straits Times ran a story about us in 2010, a stranger called us up and donated 1,500 brand new Pilot and Uniball pens to us. People can indeed be frustrating, but their goodness is the reason why we’re still here.

4.    Patience is golden

Development is important but the pace of progression matters too. At the core of Save That Pen are the four of us—all of whom have full-time jobs. Save That Pen continues to be our pet “CCA” even though we’ve entered the working-world. The call for development came in the last year as we’ve been working to introduce the project into MOE Schools. We’ve been doing things one step at a time ever since—first we had to get funding for the bins, then we had to dream up on an implementation plan for the schools, let the schools run in, gather feedback… you get the idea. Point is, up till today, we are not ready to take a large number of schools onboard for the project. We are working on that, but well, patience is golden, for now.

5.    Laugh, Love, Live

When Save That Pen first came into fruition, I was going through a rough patch in my life, and expanding extra energy (of which, on hindsight, I seemed to have a lot) to sort pens, or go around the campus to check out the state of our hand-made bins was a therapeutic experience. The two who founded the project with me were very patient. Long talks into the night, midnight escapades to steal sand from West Coast to build our very first pen-bin and the lost alcoholic nights of an undergraduate years coalescing with pen-sorting more than helped me live life in those years. Mostly, we could never stop giggling over the reason why we scraped the original name for the project because it sounded obscene (read: Pens for Pennies). Later, when I left the country for a year to further my studies, the girls helmed the project without me with no complaints.

Make sure that the people who change the world with you are more than working partners. Make sure they are friends.

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'5 Lessons to change the world' concludes "The Action Collective", which featured five guests involved in humanitarian and environmental work. To view the articles under The Action Collective, click here.

Black and White

Peace is a journalist and a ‘recent’ graduate from the National University of Singapore (or so she believes to convince herself she’s still young). But maybe she really is still young at heart, taking baby steps at learning about this world she’s living in. Peace grew up in a loving family and hadn’t had much to worry about for the most of her childhood. Easily affected and touched by what she encounters, Peace spent most of her younger days avoiding the not-so-rosy picture of our society. But she’s grown to understand that she can no longer hide from the imperfection and appreciate that the knowledge of it can help effect change in our society. 

Since young, I’ve always been fascinated by TV serials about law. My parents have always instilled a sense of right and wrong in me, which I thank them for, as it protected me from many dangerous aspects of our society. Things were always black and white. I’ve also conveniently (and mistakenly) equated legality to morality. In a sense, I had been very fortunate that I never had to encounter a situation where I had to deal with the ‘grey areas’. 

A few years back, I went with my university friends for a school field trip to Thailand. I admit that one of the main reasons I went for the trip was that I thought it was a fun way to clear modules. But I’ve gained a lot more from the trip. 

We went to many regions in Thailand, but it was the stay at Mae Sot that was particularly entrenched in my memory. It is a town in western Thailand that shares a border with Myanmar. I remember that we visited a school that had many students from Myanmar. We were also told that there were many of such schools and that these students were illegal migrants. Our instructors told us that Thai authorities there often close one eye to such cases and allow these students to stay in Thailand to seek better education and their families, better job opportunities. I must say that the idea of it being illegal did make me feel uncomfortable for a moment, but the compassion of the Thai authorities and schools as well as the enthusiasm of the Myanmar students for learning immediately eradicated all the rigid black-and-white thinking that I had all these years. 

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"The Action Collective" features six guests involved in humanitarian and environmental work. Our last guest will be Huishan Aprilene Goh, who helped founded Save That Pen, an organization that refills donated used pens and ships them to school children in Southeast Asia.

The realisation

Say Lin is an animal welfare and wildlife conservation advocate newly based in Vientiane Province, Laos. As a representative of a Singaporean NGO, ACRES, he is there to set up Laos’ first ever wildlife sanctuary for rescued, surrendered and confiscated animals. He hopes to learn the Lao language and visit as many places in the Indochina region as possible. Say Lin also enjoys cycling and one day hopes to tour Laos by bicycle.

            I haven’t always been passionate about protecting animals and the environment. In fact, even as recently as 2008, I was largely unaware of the many issues that animals and the environment face.

            This isn’t to say that I didn’t like animals. I did, only I wasn’t as informed as I am now. With hundreds of dogs in shelters, daily cases of dog abandonment and countless more being euthanized daily, I bought Buddy in 2008, a pure-bred Shetland Sheepdog, for SGD$1,500 from a local breeder. I love him dearly and do not regret my decision to buy him, but I probably wouldn’t have bought him if I knew of the aforementioned statistics, and the problem with puppy mills.

            2008 was the same year I witnessed an army platoon mate shoot at an innocent Javan Myna at the shooting range. I felt highly uncomfortable as I looked at the mangled mess amidst its feathers, but I did nothing.

            I was the usual child who loved watching Animal Planet and Discovery Channel, and enjoyed my visits to the zoo, circus or marine park. Despite being oblivious to the plight of wild animals in captivity back then, I had questions, many questions. I remember watching the Orcas at the San Diego Sea World and asking my father this: “Why are some of their dorsal fins upright, while others are bent or curled in an arc?”

My father didn’t know the answer, but his best guess was that this was genetically predetermined, just like how some of us have brown eyes while others have blue eyes. I learnt many years later that those bent dorsal fins were a phenomenon only seen in captive whales. Captive whales spend all their time swimming in circles, within tanks of still, sterile water, only a tiny fraction of space compared to their natural habitat. Their fins are bent due to muscle degeneration caused by the lack of use in a captive environment.

2008 was also the same year I joined the Singapore Night Safari as a Junior Trainer-Presenter at the Animal Shows Department. I believe this was when I begun a journey of realisation. Working with wild animals in cages on a weekly basis, beginning to know them as individuals and how their moods change, I gradually had more and more questions. The only difference this time was that I was old enough to seek answers for myself now, and I didn’t like the answers I found.

I began to understand that many of the human-animal relationships that exist in our world today are highly flawed. Factory farming, bear bile farming, puppy mills, poaching of wild animals for exotic dishes, pets or entertainment, these examples would arguably be okay if the following assumption held true: “Animals are inanimate objects devoid of any cognitive function.”

This isn’t the case at all. Animals, no matter what species or degree of cognitive function, may have feelings or at least an important role to play in this world. Over many years, with the ability of language and technology, humans have managed to engineer a world of our own. We think we have managed to isolate ourselves from the natural world, and we take everything from the environment for our self-benefit and call it our own. I think that it is pure arrogance as a human race, to think that we are different from other animals, and we can extract and exploit them as we wish. I find it ironic that the word “humane” is used to refer to a positive manner of treatment for an animal or person, when it was man that caused most of the negativity in the first place.

I have joined a small group of people who believe in a world that does not just include humans, but animals and the environment as well. I do not wish to impose my ideas on people, but I aim to raise awareness about this wider worldview so that they may make their own decisions.

Right now, my work focuses on giving animals a better life. I aim to contribute to a world where animals are not exploited, but treated with respect and hopefully one day, they will not be victims of our human arrogance.

We destroy what we do not understand, or simply what we do not appreciate. I urge everyone to at least start small. Try observing the next animal you meet a little longer than intended. Think about how or why animals behave the way they are in the wild, in a zoo, or on the screen. You may just be pleasantly surprised at what you might discover.

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"The Action Collective" features six guests involved in humanitarian and environmental work. Next Wednesday, we'll have Peace Chiu.

A Different Kind of Discomfort: My Best and Last Community Service Trip

Stephanie is a part-time performance poet and full-time law student living in London. She volunteers at the Advisory Service for Squatters where she helps advise squatters and homeless people in the UK and sometimes gets invited to their parties in return. She also plays in a samba band. She hopes to spend less time on social media and more time creating lasting things in 2013.

The most enlightening community service trip I ever went on was also the last service trip I ever went on, all thanks to what someone said on the first night.

It was the Christmas break of my second year studying in the US. I was on a service trip with a group of around 12 students from my university in small-town Ohio. We were going volunteer in a neighbourhood in inner-city Chicago, known for having one of the highest rates of gun crime and murder in the US. We were going there for a week to help out at an after-school centre and get involved in outreach work with an organization which worked with former gang members educate communities about gun violence. The trip was organized by two students from my university, a girl from a suburb of Ohio and a guy (I’ll call him C) who had grown up in the neighbourhood himself. We would later find out he had lost his father and friend to gang violence when he was younger.  

It was our first night staying in the small after-school community centre.  We were having a reflection session sitting in a circle in the classroom to talk about our experiences and how we felt. We had dutifully shut the curtains on all the windows for security reasons. We were still overwhelmed. We had arrived at the school in the afternoon, after a 9h drive from our university. The  supervisors and the 40 kids in the after-school program had arrived a few hours later, and we ran around all evening trying to make ourselves useful and make friends with them. At least, that’s what I saw.

It came to C’s turn to speak. Everyone before him had said more or less the same things (how they had been excited, nervous, tired, etc.). He said simply “To be honest, you people disgust me. I saw it this evening. The way you looked at the kids I grew up with, my community, and how we live. I saw it in your eyes…the pity, the way you judged us…I felt sick.”  

That’s probably the last thing anyone wants to hear on a voluntary service trip, least of all from the leader of the trip. But it did spark a heavy discussion. Again, the context: he was an African-American who grew up in a rough neighbourhood who had taken two car loads of largely-privileged, mostly white, upper-middle class students (his friends) from his private university in a pretty town to a part of Chicago they would otherwise never set foot in, to meet (and ‘help’) the people he had grown up with. He was in a strange position: both belonging to the group of volunteers and the group of people being ‘helped’. There were bound to be some discomforting moments for everyone.

We understood that what he said wasn’t personal: it was just how he felt that day. And what he noticed. A few people tried to explain that it a lot of it also had to do with trying to make a good impression in a new environment, it did not necessarily mean we were looking down on them. Someone suggested that maybe we all should think about why we were on a service trip in the first place. The thing was, even if none of the volunteers felt like they were actively judging anyone that day, the fact that he felt the need to bring it up did raise issues about who we thought we were and what we thought we were doing. Did we see ourselves as saviours? As superior? Was the very act of going on a service trip, as one guy pointed out, a way of saying ‘I am better, richer and smarter than you, that’s why I have the time to go to your home to help you’?

         The rest of the trip went all right, there were no hard feelings but a new, humbled kind of awareness. The people we made friends with in Chicago on the pretext of ‘helping’ didn’t really need us, but were glad that a group of people from a world far removed from theirs could be bothered to visit them and lend a hand. And who doesn’t benefit from making connections with people?

         That was the last short service trip I went on. I guess it made me think too much about my privilege and place in the world, and the best way to change it What I took from it was the idea that we as volunteers were not that special nor vital, and would never change the world with a weeklong holiday. In my view, if you really want to make some sort of impact on injustice, long-term volunteering in the place where you live is a better use of time, even if it does sound less exciting.

Having said this, I don’t regret going on any of the service trips I have been on. And I would encourage you to go on one if you’ve never been on one before. Learn, be humbled, make friends, return with stories. Just don’t kid yourself that that is all you owe the world, that the world is somehow a much better place, or that you are a better person because you decided to have a different kind of holiday. Read the history of the place, keep informed about the place long after you have left. Stay in touch with whoever you met. Be mindful of how you were able to go on the trip in the first place, how you presented yourself, why you were doing it. Stay uncomfortable. Don’t just be grateful for what you have, think about why you have it and ‘they’ don’t. Don’t stop thinking.

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"The Action Collective" features six guests involved in humanitarian and environmental work. Next Wednesday, we'll have Farhan M.

Change of Focus

Jolie, aged 17, is currently studying for the Cambridge 'A' levels. She has a passion for athletics. 

In 2012, after hearing numerous accounts of how my friends coped with family members diagnosed with cancer, I decided to do something about it. I went up to my room, turned on the computer and Googled ‘cancer organisations’. I found out that I could volunteer to be a charity athlete and raise funds for the Singapore Cancer Society. 

That was when it started – my desire to contribute to society started growing in my heart. I started promoting my website on different social networks and told my friends and teachers about it. I had friends who supported me throughout this entire journey. Their support has kept my desire to help others alive and made it possible for me to persevere. I placed all of my focus on this project, I trained hard for it to ensure that I completed the 15km cancer race in one and a half hours. For a person who has never run such a long distance, this was a tough challenge. 

I found out that running a charity race made me think of others, and is a good way to appreciate everything around me. When you take the focus off of yourself and place it upon others, it makes others’ lives better, and mine extraordinary. The difficulties that I have had in my own life made me knew what it was like to go through something hard, and I wanted to help.

Though it happened back in April 2010, I can still remember my father’s heart attack vividly. How my mother and I rushed our way to the hospital. At that moment, everything faded away into insignificance. A thousand thoughts flooded my head. I tried to comfort myself but my attempts were futile. The nurses and doctors hurrying outside the operating theatre seemed a blur; their brisk footsteps seemed to echo the aching heartbeat of my family as we waited in anticipation. I paced down the aisle, worried, anxious and filled with fear. My father’s heart attack made me realise that life is uncertain, and that we don’t know how much time we have on this earth. I want to treasure every single opportunity that I have in life and live it my own way. 

The images of pain and suffering that I saw in cancer patients have never left my mind, and are still vivid memories to this day. I am determined to try and do whatever I can to help people who are less fortunate than me because I believe that true happiness can only be achieved while helping others. 

I certainly do not know what change I have made, I do not know what would happen, but I am sure it would never be the same.

One doesn’t need fancy or extravagant ways to help others to make a difference. In fact, it is the small actions that will stay with them the most. 

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"The Action Collective" features six guests involved in humanitarian and environmental work. Next Wednesday, we'll have Stephanie Chan, a witty friend and a prolific spoken word artist.