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SINGAPORE (THE NEW DOCUMENT) – When they opened the unit’s front door in Block 64 Lorong 5 Toa Payoh, the Keeping Hope Alive volunteers knew they were going to have a long day.
The one-bedroom rental apartment on the ground floor was so full of trash that none of them could get into the unit.
But there was a back door and they entered that way. Once inside, the volunteers were greeted with an even more unpleasant sight when they started cleaning the place on Sunday (September 6).
“The big roaches are over,” Fion Phua, who founded the organization, told The New Paper on Wednesday.
He added that the floor was also infested with rats.
And the smell was so bad that volunteers who donned personal protective equipment (PPE), which included a mask, a face shield, and two layers of surgical gloves, had to apply medicinal ointment to withstand the pungent smell.
The group of about 35 volunteers worked in shifts and in groups of five – due to social distancing rules – to clean the floor.
They did it in about seven hours, dumping more than 30 garbage bags and other items like broken fans, bicycles and televisions.
Phua, 50, said her group, who visit rental flats every Sunday, met the resident two weeks ago when they visited the block to help their neighbor, an elderly woman, fix a leaky faucet.
During the visit, they noticed that the hearing-impaired elderly man was wearing dirty clothes, was barefoot and slept on cardboard sheets along the hallway in front of his floor.
Identified by the Chinese night newspaper Lianhe Wanbao as 81-year-old Mr. Chen Yongfa, the man said he had no intention of accumulating garbage.
Living alone in the flat for the past four years, he said he collected discarded items and sold them for a living.
But he had to keep the items at home after Covid-19 hit, as he couldn’t sell them and was too old to clean up the mess.
With the help of Keeping Hope Alive volunteers, who worked from 8 am to 3 pm on Sunday, Mr. Chen now has a new bed.
He told Wanbao: “Now I can finally sleep comfortably in bed and not in the company of rats and cockroaches.”
Ms. Phua and her volunteers intend to visit Mr. Chen again to give his now-empty apartment a fresh coat of paint, and they also plan to help their neighbor clean his apartment.
He said the pandemic has been tough on his volunteers.
“The difficult part is that when you wear PPE, there is no ventilation. It is hot, there is humidity and it is very difficult to breathe.”
But it has been even more difficult for seniors living in rental flats alone, especially in the beginning, he said.
“Imagine if you can’t go out, you can’t have visitors, you don’t have phone calls or connections. It can be very frustrating.”
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