Singapore, Another New Beginning!

by Laura Colter

July 1, 2016; after what seemed like a long night of fireworks to celebrate Canada’s 149th birthday; leaving behind 27 years of what we knew as home including more than 40 members of our family; and 24 hours of travel time, we arrived in Singapore, feeling lost, alone and reluctant to start all over again. Although our furniture and belongings filled the condominium which we now call home, there was a sense of emptiness and fear as to what this new beginning will bring upon us. We had one long month to learn and explore all the places and things which now makes us feel at ease. The memory of all the times we experienced navigation issues along East Coast Road, brings a faint smile. Although these memories seem afar, we have just been in this country for 445 days and we’ve had our share of amazing experiences, including all the wonderful food, cultural variations and great stories to carry for the rest of our lives and that of our children. Coming from a vast multicultural community in Toronto, Canada and being amidst people of many different nationalities, I must say life in Singapore is quite an experience on its own. This experience was further enhanced by the enrolment of our children at the CIS (Canadian International School). We must admit that the choice of school and the neighbourhood were promising factors and facilitated greatly in the adjustment process. The school community, including staff, parents and fellow classmates were very welcoming and gave us all a sense of belonging. The open doors policy was inviting and gave us a chance as parents to be at ease with our children’s education system. What further personally engaged me was the opportunity to be a Room Parent which I think is a great way to integrate parents into the school community and engage them in school activities and events. This was a means of connecting with the students, teachers and parents further making way for a great social platform. Although, I am not yet too familiar with Singapore, I know it well enough to call it our second home. We now have friends from many different nationalities and countries and I feel that this friendship will continue for years to come. As much as we miss having the four seasons, making snow angels, snow days, raking all the fall leaves looking forward to a new beginning every spring, and enjoy hot summers on the beach, we love Singapore and all that it has to offer. We love biking down East Coast Park on a hot sunny day and are suddenly hit with a downpour, the outdoor pools that lack heavy chlorine odour, not having to bundle up to go out and all the outdoors that we have to enjoy though out the year. This has truly turned out to be an adventure and experience that is unforgettable.

CIS Tanjong Kantong Campus are Reader’s Cup Champions!

By Nadine Bailey
(TK Teacher-Librarian)

What is the first question in the library this year? “Ms. Nadine, when does Readers’ Cup start and what are we reading?!”

The buzz is growing again at the Canadian International School’s TK campus in hopes of a repeat of the 2015/6 school year, when much excitement was to be found in the TK library.  Students reading through a pile of books not once, not twice but up to 13 times! And then creating questions and quizzing each other. What was it all about? TK was determined to walk home with one of the Readers’ Cup prizes.  Readers’ Cup is an annual Singapore Inter-school reading competition where teams of six students compete in one of three divisions. To get onto one of the teams, students first had to get through the preliminary round in their school. The questions were in the form of an online socrative quiz, a paper quiz on each book and a long-form essay question on the book.

The hours of reading and hard work paid off when the TK team walked home with first prize in the older readers division. The  “Purple Page Eaters” team: Abigail Bilsand, Vedang Deshpande, Amy Deng, Aidan MacKay, Sonja Lee and Minji Kim, (with reserve player Jasmine Yu) beat 20 other teams from International Schools to come first in their division (and a team from the Lakeside campus also did extremely well, placing third in the same division). Not only did the winning team win the cup, a medal, and a subscription to Epic Books, but all our students in all our teams have won by reading extensively and intensively and it’s showing in the rise in their reading ability!

Family house building trip to Cambodia (22-27 March 2014)

 By Geraldine van Dijk

It started in November 2013, when I read in the Canadian International School’s WAG (Week at a Glance) that CIS families could participate in a family house building trip to Cambodia.

The info evening organized by the teacher in charge, Lennan MacDonald, convinced me to join with my 2 boys.

The joining group had to raise money to fund the building of at least 10 houses. Since the houses were $1100 each to build, one of the parents came up with the brilliant idea to have a weekly bake sale at the Tanglin Trust School during netball training.

And it took off… every week we had families selling the baked goodies, coffee, tea and cold drinks.  Every week, our funds accumulated. In the mean time there were collections of clothes and stationary and we each took 10kg per head extra to Cambodia.

Tickets and hotel were booked well in advance of the trip to make sure we were all in the same hotel in Phom Penh’s “the Plantation” and in total, there were 37 adults and 31 children. 

Day 1.  Visit to the NHCC - New Hope for Cambodian Children.  Orphans are 80% HIV infected!  The individual care, accommodation, love, education, medication and support they receive, felt overwhelmingly warm and we only saw happy children.

We joined them for a home cooked lunch and although the weather was piping hot, the CIS boys played soccer with the orphan boys, while the girls danced together.  It was here we donated our 700kg of clothes!

Day 2. We started the day with a briefing on the upcoming house-building day at Tabitha.  Janne Ritskes has committed her life to Cambodia since her first visit in the 90’s and now runs Tabitha Cambodia.

Our next stop was the PIO school (People Improvement Organization) – which is better known as ‘the school built on the dump’.  It started with 1 teacher and 1 classroom built next to a landfill site and now provides education to 2000 children who used to roam the landfill sites to find stuff to sell or eat. We donated our old school uniforms and stationary and teachers and children greeted us enthusiastically and showed us around.

Day 3. At 7:30am we began the 2-hour drive to our house building project. The homes are on stilts and the foundation and roofs are already built. Our job was to hammer the floors in and place the tin walls. The weather was hot and humid, but it felt so unbelievably good to do something for these people who have so little.

The children were very engaged, enthusiastic, open minded and helpful and at the end of the day we presented a beautifully quilted blanket from Tabitha to every family.

The whole trip was overpowering, overwhelming and emotional.  We met amazing people who have started these wonderful projects to help the Cambodian people.

Thank you CIS for organizing this journey!

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

By Laura Day, CAS Member

It wouldn’t be a REAL Canadian story if it wasn’t just a little bit larger than life.  In our annual effort to inundate our three kids with as much Canadiana as possible, we embarked on a few truly Canadian memory-making excursions this past summer. I won’t bore you with the fishing stories from Port Alberni and the twenty-one 10lb sockeye salmon hooked in only 2 hours, or snorkeling down Campbell River with the salmon (all true!), but I will share a good bear story!  

I should have known that we were going to be in for an adventure when, sitting in our car before hockey camp (on real Canadian ice!), we were going through the standard cautionary bear warnings when one of the kids commented, in a very nonchalant manner, “you mean like that one right there?” “YES! YES! Just like that one!”, I shouted, while the rest of the family scrambled for cell-phones to photograph what had just occurred.

A few days later, as we were enjoying a quiet lunch on a patio in the village with friends, I realised the car sighting was just the appetizer and the main course was about to be served.  I heard some yelling, then saw an RCMP running towards us and just behind him another RCMP and one panicked looking black bear.  It all happened so quickly that most of the way-relaxed Whistler tourists failed to even notice.  Bryan, my husband, and daughter Jaimie stood up to get a better look and a photo, and 

inadvertently got in the bear’s path as he attempted to get away from the yelling police officers.  Bryan, the intrepid amateur photo journalist, threw Jaimie out of the bear’s way and managed to snap a couple of great photos!

Much to the dismay of several Canadian friends, my pictures on Facebook of the kids snow tubing only helped to perpetuate the myth of Canada’s frozen tundra and wintery temperatures…. even in July!  For our kids though it was heaven - REAL SNOW.  Our improvised winter wardrobes of jeans, sweatshirts and tevas with socks, didn’t cut it for long though, no matter how ‘cool’ the snow was.  

The older the kids get the bigger the adventures and of course, the bigger the stories.  Now we just have to figure out how to top this summer adventure next year.