society that helps the poor

in pak lah’s hari raya speech, he commanded groups which help the needy.

this is a cue for me to talk about the society (church based) i’m involved in which helps the poor and needy.

if you look at the sidebar, under ‘alternatives and ngo’ you’ll notice SSVP at the bottom. well SSVP stands for ‘society of st vincent de paul’. you can read about SSVP in its website but sorry to say that the website is not updated. you’ll notice my name there under ‘national council’ but no, i’m no longer in national council. and don’t be surprise at the ‘sis’ tag, thinking i’m a sister (nun!). oh no i’m not. in our society, we call everybody ‘brother’ and ‘sister’.

i used to be the state secretary (for 8 years mind you!) but now i’m the ‘penang diocesan’ secretary. by ‘diocesan’ here means covering the 3 northern states (kedah, perak, penang). but all of us who are in the national or state or diocesan board, comes from the grass-root…. i.e. the church where we goes to. in this case, i’m under the ‘assumption church’ and our society in the church is known as a ‘conference’, therefore the conference i’m in is known as ‘conference of assumption’. under conference, i hold the post of treasure. we have only 7 members in our conference but that is enough as we believe in ‘quality better than quantity’.

what each conferences do is to look out for poor or needy people in their area, and help them out in terms of cash or rations like rice, milo, biscuits. these poor people who comes under our care, we refer to them as our ‘adoptees’. we ‘adopt’ them, and see to their needs. apart from giving them cash aid or ration every month, we will help them out in whatever ways when the need arise, e.g. see to the children’s education need, medical aid, simple things like paying for a pair of spectacles for the adoptee, and many other stuffs.

we help everyone irregardless of race or religion but most of them are non christians indians. we tread carefully when dealing with muslims, because you know, the sensitivities of christians helping muslims (at least to the muslim authorities!).

well so to anyone of you who knows of some poor people, who are deserving of help (yes, of course we do investigate first before we agree to ‘adopt’ them) esp. in penang, do email me. we’ll see what we can do.