About Familiar Strangers – Share A Meal

Familiar Strangers is a collaboration with National Youth Council & National Integration Council. The objectives of Familiar Strangers were:

  1. Increase the level of understanding amongst Singaporeans
  2. Improve sentiments that Singaporeans hold towards low-wage migrant workers

The project is carried out by 6 volunteers and involves a total of 25 youth participants from age 15 to 35 and a total of 80 beneficiaries. The project consists of two events – Share A Meal and Photography Workshops.

The Share A Meal event was particularly special because it is a small start to our ultimate goal of bringing Singaporeans and Migrant Workers together. It was also having to push our target audience from being passive to being participative. Sharing stories and learning about each other is great, but it would not amount to much if there is no interaction. Hence, watching migrant workers and Singaporeans enjoy each other’s company and learning more about each other at the event was a really significant moment. More importantly we believe that food is a catalyst for deeper conversations to occur and an opportunity to interact, socialize and bond. We often find ourselves engaged in conversations with our friends and loved ones over meals, and on certain occasions even with strangers when we share a table at our favourite hawker spot.

From Share A Meal, 84.2% of the 25 respondents said that they feel Share A Meal improved the understanding of migrant workers, while 78.9% said that they feel Share A Meal improved the sentiments towards migrant workers.

The Highlights

Enthusiasm from Everyone

For Share A Meal, the outcome was also amazing to see. One of the migrant workers, Ariani, brought along her guitar so we asked if she was willing to perform for us and she willingly agreed. It was also amazing to see how everyone was enthusiastic about it when they all started dancing because one of the songs she played was according to her, a song meant for dancing. What we set out to achieve at the start which was to bridge the gap between migrant workers and Singaporeans really did come true during this event.

Eye Opener to the lives of migrant workers

One of the participants, Lyvia Loh Li Xuan, said that Share A Meal has truly been an eye opener to the lives of foreign migrant workers whom we share Singapore with. This event unlike any other, allowed her the opportunity to meet and interact with some migrant workers. The event helped her to understand that migrant workers and herself share some similarities. This may be a stepping stone to integrating our society. Another participant, Nurul Amirah Haris, reflected that Share-A-Meal event managed to break the mental barrier she had earlier and changed her perceptions of them completely.

 The Memories

Reflection #1 – The Challenges

Participation from migrant workers

For Share A Meal, it was difficult to get a concrete number of migrant workers who could promise that they could come due to work schedules. As such, our event sign up for migrant worker side were rather risky as we could not get confirmation from the migrant worker side. We overcome it by sending a member of the team to Tai Seng on the event date so as to bring the workers to Food For Thought. As such, we managed to get a 1:1 ratio of migrant workers and Singaporeans.

Reflection #2 – The Takeaways

Increasing the Number of Participants

For Share A Meal, I think we could have increased the number of participants to a higher number. We were rather hesitant about this due to cost and the fear of low sign ups but after this event, we realised that Singaporeans are really interested in such events and were really participative when they were there.