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A Friend to Read is a Friend Indeed
(THE NEW PAPER: Friday, November 13, 1998)
By Crispina Robert
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VOLUNTEERS NEEDED
A whopping 640 children have been referred to
SINDA by their teachers for having reading
disabilities. But there are only 50 volunteers to read
to them. Said Ms Zaitoon Bivee, in charge of
Project Read: ³Ideally we want one volunteer to one
child. Thatıs why, most of them have to wait.² The
children are five to eight years old. The volunteers
need spend only one hour, once a week with a child.
Most of the children speak Tamil at home and their
parents simply canıt read to them. If you wish to
volunteer, call Ms Zaitoon at 3937241. |
Little Rajveen Kaur counts the hours to the time when her favourite friend comes to her home. And this “friend” is medical student, S Neeta, 19, who helps Rajveen, a Primary 1 pupil, to read English.
Yes, read. In what is one of the most important SINDA projects, Project Read is helping children like Rajveen who can’t read well. “I was getting very worried because Rajveen was failing her exams. Her teacher said it was because she cannot read,” said the girl’s mother Madam Bajan Kaur, 37, a housewife.
She and her husband, a driver could not afford tuition fees for her daughter. They also have two sons aged 16 and nine. Help came in the form of Miss Neeta, a second-year medical undergrad at the National University of Singapore and a volunteer with SINDA. “She’s an easy child to be with,” said Miss Neeta. Earlier, Madam Bajan would buy her daughter books and tell her to read them.
But she said: “Sometimes, I also didn’t know the big words. So I asked my son to help his sister. He read to her but when she couldn’t follow, he’d pinch her and they would fight.” But those days are happily over for Rajveen.
She has begun to love reading and can read words like aeroplane effortlessly. She has even written a small piece called Cinderella. “This is her own story. She’s picking up,” said Miss Neeta.
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