Siti Noor Mastura’s voice starts quavering as tears well up in her eyes. She stops talking, blinking furiously as she swallows the lump in her throat.
The tears drop; her right hand reaches out for a piece of tissue paper on the table.
Her chest of painful memories from one of the darkest periods in her life has just been unlocked.
Forced to leave school and shelve her dreams, she had been struggling, for five years, to cope with a divorced mother battling with depression, an elder sister suffering from bipolar disorder and two younger sisters still in school.
They lived hand to mouth and had to keep moving from one dingy rental flat to another.
It was just too much to bear for a then 22-year-old.
Life turned around. Her mother got better, so did her elder sister.
The burden placed on her lifted, Miss Mastura began to blossom, both personally and professionally.
She became a flight attendant and started seeing the world. But she never forgot the poverty which once shackled her, and started a food distribution initiative Back2Basics to help the poor.
With a nudge from serendipity, her social awakening also led her to start the Interfaith Youth Circle (IYC) to build bridges between people from different faiths.
The 28-year-old’s passion for social change has not gone unnoticed. Two years ago, Miss Mastura won the President’s Volunteerism and Philanthropy Award (Youth Category).
She didn’t set out to be a youth leader but now that she is one, she intends to work even harder to make the world a better place.
The Singapore Airlines flight attendant makes quite an impression in person. She is impressively articulate, expressing her feelings and ideas in a clear, warm and engaging voice.
“I loved theatre when I was in school,” she says with a laugh.
Things came to a head when she came home after the first day of her N-level exams to find her mother slumped against the wall. Their living room looked as though it had been ransacked.
“She was screaming ‘I can’t take this anymore; I have to get out!’ and then she collapsed to the floor. She had two packed bags in front of her,” says Miss Mastura, who starts crying at the memory.
Then 17 years old, her instincts told her to get her mother out.
“I realised what was holding her back were her girls. So I told her not to worry and that I’d take care of my younger sisters, then aged just 11 and 12. My elder sister was in hospital; they were trying to figure out what was wrong with her.”
She called for a taxi, walked her mother out to the main road and packed her off to her paternal grandmother’s home.
“The walk back from the main road to the condo was the longest in my life. I was asking myself what I had got myself into,” she says.
Shortly after, her mother sent for Miss Mastura and her siblings.
Putting up with relatives long term was not viable so they were forced to lead a peripatetic lifestyle, moving 11 times in five years.
Forced to abandon her studies, Miss Mastura became a relief teacher at her old primary school and later supported her family by conducting speech and drama enrichment classes for schools.
Fortunately, her mother’s younger brother and his wife came to the rescue in 2012.
“When they saw how we were living, they said: ‘No, this is not happening.’ They told my mother: ‘You may think you can live like this but your daughters can’t.'”
They put together a sum of money for a flat in Serangoon where Miss Mastura and her family live to this day.
That pivoted their lives around in a major way.
Her mother got better and went back to work, even encouraging her second daughter to get licensed as a property agent, which she did.
In 2013, with life on an even keel, Miss Mastura started Back2Basics with two friends.
“When times were bad, I had often gone to bed hungry and it is one of the worst feelings in the world, especially for children. I told God that if I got out of my situation, I would do something about it.”
By then, she had started volunteering with an organisation which gave out free groceries during Ramadan.
“I did some research. Many organisations were giving free groceries but only during special occasions. What were poor families supposed to live on for the rest of the year?”
Back2Basics started out as a personal project, with Miss Mastura and her friends buying groceries with their own money and personally delivering them each month to three families.
Over time, the outfit attracted not just publicity but also volunteers and has grown organically.
Registered formally this year, it now helps more than 50 families.
“We don’t just deliver groceries to poor families. We also work with different partners to get them out of the poverty cycle by helping them look for jobs and educational opportunities,” says Miss Mastura, who won a Silent Hero Award from the Hillview Civilian Sports Club in 2015.
“Thirteen of the families we have helped have dropped out of our programme because they can now stand on their own feet,” she says proudly.
Engaged to a banker-turned-teacher from Britain, she says she and her family are in a good place now.
They have made peace with their father, who has since remarried. Her elder sister is now an artist and a mental health advocate. One of her younger siblings teaches in a madrasah, while the other is president of Back2Basics.
Miss Mastura’s biggest dream now is to go back to school.
“This is my time. I really want to do something for myself.”
Watch the video below for her story.
Read more here.
Source: The Straits Times, 16 December 2018