A New Dream

5th July 2009 will be considered the start of a new dream for me. It has been 1 year since the production of the Sign language Dictionary. It took 3 years since Patrick came up with that idea one Volunteer gathering where he suggested a dictionary that volunteers can use as a reference guide. I took the challenge up.
Now, the dictionary is all over the world and it is starting to be a blessing for many of the Deaf ministries. It is not the end yet. I will hear more about it in the future.

MHI has been going to the Ph for the last 3 years consecutively. We started to reach out to our sister Pg Church last year to encourage them. However in my heart, such trips are just "separate trips". We go in to help and then leave our friends to return back to our lives. We cannot really say we have a "continuity" to the countries we visited. We leave a space to the help we give.
I asked myself how then do we proceed from here? Patrick asked me to find out more about M Deaf schools which I did the beginning of the year after we return from the Ph. All thanks once again to the publicity created when one of our dictionaries landed in Y. However no matter how much I try to contact further, there seemed to be a block to my inquiries. In short, all I have is BLACK.
5th July 2009 was MHI monthly Prayer meeting. I was in the group where WN was sharing about his trip to C. After the meeting, C remained in my mind all the time. I was wondering why until when the weekday came, I felt the prompting to just send an email to the Methodist Mission Society.
I knew it is over my head. But I have to do it to find out if i am going to get any response from the pastor in charge. Within a short 2 hours, I have a reply and was surprised I was referred to T who has been working as a coordinator in C.
I received a call from T who promptly wanted to see me and discuss about my ideas. The appointment was made and I found myself in her office with a small group, listening to her describe the new country of C and what was already done there by the Missions Society.
For the last few weeks, alot of thoughts ran through my mind. Can it be done? 18 years ago, MHI was started with just a small handful of volunteers. There were no hearing impaired then. We made the mistake of appproaching the adult HI. We lost our way for a few months before we realise our direction was towards the students and younger HI. As we changed direction and started looking for them, we were affirmed when God gave us many of them coming to our ministry. That is our direction. That is our target group. We were to make sure they are educated and to grow in strength and stature, to be grounded in the Holy Spirit. To know the importance to read the Bible and because valuable citizens when they grow up and to go back to the Deaf Community to help other youths.

This year as I saw many of the youths agree with the importance of education, to be the best that they can be, I see that many have made it or will be making their way to a tertiary education center be it Polytechnic or University. My concern is whether our society in Singapore when they graduate, do we recognise our youths to be the same as any graduates from the school? Will they have the same employment opportunities? Same salary scale?

Or will they still face the same economic difficulty with or without their higher education?

My thoughts were: Can we address both these issues of 1) MHI helping our friends from other countries and 2) economic issues of our graduating youths? Can we still hold on to the things we taught and shared with them like "Education builds the character of a person" and "A person of integrity gives back to the society" and finally "We will glorify God with our heart, mind and body"?