"Where is my bawang (onions)?"

The 60-year-old aunty asked us while we were clearing the rubbish at the void deck of her block. Fion Phua, our founder, was the only one among us fluent in Malay, and she was speaking with her. I didn't understand half of what they said, but I got some parts. We tried to explain to her that the tray of onions was rotten, but the aunty was saying, while showing gestures with her hand, that she could peel off the rotten parts and still use the onions.

We were asked to assist in clearing the home of a resident at Canberra last Sunday. The lady was very organized, so the condition of her home wasn't the worst, but the amount of things she had was getting in the way of access into her apartment in case of an emergency.

Our volunteers, young and old, all put our backs into it, forming a line along the tight corridor to bring everything out to the lift lobby, where there was more space to sort out the good from the bad.

We set up a corner for food, a corner for clothes, and so on, and asked the aunty to look through and give us the go-ahead. Here, I must say how impressed I was with Ci En, one of our youth volunteers, with her patience in going through some items with the aunty one by one.

Ci En was going through a massive bag of shoes with her. With a gently playful tone, she would ask, "Are you sure about keeping this pair of shoes, Aunty? See? It's quite stiff already; you might fall," at which the aunty would relent and allow us to throw most of the shoes away.

One thing Aunty wasn't willing to throw, however, was the plastic tray of rotten food. The onions and potatoes were rotting, and we asked that she throw them, but she insisted.

To Aunty, the onion could be saved; only the outer layers were turning bad, which could be peeled off. What I saw was the same.

One of the volunteers remarked when we were clearing her apartment that he saw a photo of her when she was younger, "She was quite chio (attractive)." This lady might be going through something quite terrible to hide behind so many layers of treasures she had accumulated over the years, and perhaps, behind all those layers is something truly beautiful?

In the end, while we were helping to load the trash into the garbage truck, Aunty hovered around the bins, perhaps unwilling to let go. Fion told her gently to go back to her cleaner home, with an English remark on top of the Malay, "Let the old things go so that you can invite good luck in."

I think we can all learn to apply a little bit of this in our daily lives too.

Why Keen