To bring love and care to the vulnerable & underprivileged elderly Cardboard collectors/tissue sellers, SowCare continued its outreach project to bless the poor & needy elderly living in rental flats with CarePacks and Ang Paos on 7 Aug (Sunday). This outreach project, Love Your (Unseen) Neighbours was organised with contributions from our sponsors, Far East Organisation, and more than 20 volunteers from Calvary Assembly of God Church & Hope Initiative Alliance.

Through this initiative, we managed to reach out to more than 20 families to provide them with Ang Pao and CarePack filled with daily household products like fresh milk powder, organic rolled oaks, Milo, toothbrush/toothpaste, biscuits, instant noodles and rice crackers. This project has brought immense joy to these unseen neighbours in our community as our volunteers interacted and befriended these socially isolated elderly cardboard collectors/tissue paper sellers.

One of our Befriender volunteers, Ms Irene Ng, shared joyfully after the event that it is “an honour to serve. Thanks for having me and hope to be able to serve again.”

John, another Befriender volunteer added, “when I participated in this project, I found out that there are many elderly cardboard collectors/tissue paper sellers out there who are extremely lonely because they live alone. They experienced loneliness and isolation because some have lost their mobility, and are hard of hearing or because their social circles have become smaller over the years. When we visited and chatted with them, their faces lit up.”

As part of our on-going initiative to reach out to these elderly cardboard collectors/tissue paper sellers, our volunteers will continue to make more home visitations to befriend and chat with these socially isolated seniors and also to assess their financial and medical conditions.