Firsthand: Community is a new series by Mothership, where we explore the spirit of community in Singapore through in-depth articles and videos.

From Tampines to Tuas, we’ll investigate the untold stories of the different neighbourhoods in Singapore — firsthand.

It was a balmy night in the 1980s, and 10-year-old Rowena Sanson was climbing out of her window down the side of her house.

Despite her entreaties, her grandmother had refused to let her join the province’s singing competition. She had school tomorrow, and it was too late, she’d insisted.

It was her cousin who stepped in to help her. After their grandmother went to bed, she dragged a ladder to the house and propped it up underneath Sanson’s window.

Together, they fled to where the competition was held — and returned, later that night, pockets heavy with pesos. She’d won the contest.

Over four decades later, 53-year-old Sanson relates this story to me with pride. She remembers every detail of the night, right down to the song she sang (One Moment in Time by Whitney Houston) and the prize money (500 pesos).

“In Singapore [dollars], it’s like S$15," she caveats. "But it’s big money for us last time.”

Today, she works as a migrant domestic worker (MDW) here in Singapore. She spends her days cooking, cleaning, and caring for her employer’s young children — a world away from that starry-eyed child in provincial Philippines.

But she has never forgotten that night, nor how much she loves to sing.

Flowers that sing

On Sundays — the traditional day off for MDWs — domestic helpers converge at the city centre in droves.

It's a bit of a cultural cliche that all Filipinos are good at singing. But song and dance is an important part of Philippine culture, and no more evident is it here in Singapore than on Sundays, when domestic helpers gather in fields to sing and dance with picnic mats and portable speakers.

One woman, Nathalie Ribette, saw this love for song with curious wonderment. She’d seen her own helper, Jacqueline, go about her work — “and she was always singing,” Ribette quips.

Having founded local theatre company Sing’Theatre, she’d seen firsthand the transformative power of music. She decided to put her experience into practice, leading to the genesis of "The Sampaguitas", a ladies’ choir especially for domestic helpers.

The concept was simple: the women would get free weekly choir lessons. Once, at the end of every semester, they'd perform for an audience; typically the sick and disadvantaged, in line with Sing’theatre’s mission to uplift people through music.

“Singing in choirs, particularly, is very powerful, and it empowers people,” she explains.

“And for me, I have a lot of tenderness for foreign domestic workers, because I think they have a difficult life. They spend their time taking care of our kids, and they cannot even live with their own kids.

So I thought that maybe we could give back to society, and help them to be happier.”

I ask her about the choir's name. "The sampaguita is a flower from the Philippines. It’s kind of emblematic of the Philippines," she explains.

“And to be honest, [the women] are amazing. I mean, they’re so happy to be here, they’re smiling…and they look like flowers. They are my flowers,” she laughs.

Every Sunday, they sing

As a professional choir, Sing’theatre requires a weekly commitment. Every session, they train their voices, practice their choreography, and run through their performance songs. 

But not every domestic helper has the privilege of a day off each week. Many surely have much less, especially as the Ministry of Manpower mandates only one rest day per month (the rest can be compensated away). These women, Ribette says, she has to turn down — "even if it breaks my heart".

I’m cognisant of what this means: the women in the choir are the lucky ones.

That's not to say that they have it easy. Sanson has worked in Singapore for the past 15 years, and she has watched her daughter and grandchildren grow up from afar.

And while daily life isn't drudgery, necessarily — she lights up when she talks about the children she cares for and has practically “raised since birth” — the days do get long.

Every morning, Sanson is the first in the household to rise, and the last to fall asleep. She makes breakfast, packs the lunches, feeds the animals, cleans the house, does the cooking. From dawn to dusk, she barely gets an hour to catch her breath.

“Monday to Friday,” she tells me. “It’s very tiring, but it’s okay. We come here to work, so we cannot complain.”

But she has it better than many of her peers, and she knows it. "I have a friend. Sometimes she just comes out like once a month. And then sometimes [she] comes out for half a day. Her employer will ask, can you come back at 3 o'clock? When she [left the house] at 10 o'clock."

Another friend recently went back home to the Philippines, unable to bear the strain of working without rest days. Her employer would only let her eat instant noodles most days — one meal a day, with rice only sometimes. 

"She wanted to go back to the agency to find another employer. But the employer told her, 'you choose. You’re either gonna work with me, or you’re gonna go home'.

"And then my friend said, ‘I’ll go. Because I don’t want to die here.’"

In comparison, her own employers respect her time off, encouraging her in her performance endeavours. They even shoo her out of the kitchen when she tries to do some cleaning on a Sunday. “They will close the door and lock the door,” she says fondly.

“So I’m lucky. But some of my friends…I feel very bad for them.”

Showing off their talent

Still, being in the Sampaguitas is one of the brighter spots in her week.

For the past 15 years, she had no cause to revisit the stage of her youth, settling instead for singing around the house and — prior to joining the choir — the occasional Sunday karaoke.

Sanson looks forward to the lessons eagerly, and even more so to the performances. “I like singing and dancing,” she tells me. “I like to explore, and show my talent.”

As Ribette tells it, the choir really is a safe space for the women to express themselves creatively. For instance, it was organised purely as a vocal activity, but one day, a group of regulars came up and asked if they could dance as well.

She told the women, sure, as long as they were the ones to create the dance, so it would truly be theirs. “And it works very well,” she says, beaming. “They come earlier, and they practise the dance together.”

On another occasion, they asked for costumes. “Usually, when they perform, they have these Sing’theatre t-shirts,” she explained. “But one day, [they] said, what about having a nice dress, you know, or a skirt…but we don’t have much money.

“So I said, look — what we can do is that we buy the fabrics, and you sew.

So then one day, they all gathered, with sewing machines, and they created their skirts. And it’s beautiful… it looks really good.”

This is something Ribette emphasises often, and the women do so as well — the choir may have been created for them, but it’s theirs now. It’s their stage, their platform, their pride.

As the quote goes: it’s their world, and we’re all just living in it.

Not just a cleaner

At Ribette’s invitation, I sit in on one of the choir lessons at the Sing’theatre studio at Tan Quee Lan Street. It’s a real black box theatre, with glossy floors and stage lights and a sound system that looks too expensive to touch.

In the spirit of theatre, the doors are even embellished with star labels. "That's so cute," my colleague comments.

The women trail in with comfortable familiarity, all smiles as they go through their warm-up exercises: hopping on tape-squares on the floor to practise their rhythm, clapping and tapping their feet to keep count.

Later, they split into groups to run through a vocal exercise, singing in three-part rounds: “Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain, listen to the rain, rhythm of the rain.”

My colleague and I listen, rapt; their energy is both contagious and arresting, and I find myself failing to take notes.

I'm struck by how serious they are about this, that they only have one rest day a week, and they're choosing to spend it here. Their voices fill the room so beautifully; it's incredible to think that these are the same women who would have been singing karaoke on a grassy field at Dhoby Ghaut, their voices drowned out by the sound of passing traffic. Here, they seem larger than life.

Ribette explains it more succinctly: “For anyone, when you sing, and you see the impact your singing has on an audience, it’s amazing... to see how you can touch the lives of people.

“So for these women, I think it’s important to show them that they are not only cleaners. They can also touch the lives of people, in different ways.”

Learning contentment

At the end of our interview, I ask the women what their favourite songs are. One woman pipes up: Desimee Pilapil, a slim, soft-spoken 47-year-old.

The song she chooses is "She Used to be Mine" by Sara Bareilles. It's from a musical about a talented baker who winds up in an unfulfilling job as a waitress, that she sings while reflecting on her unrealised dreams.

“It really fits me, because I am a worker here," she explains simply, before singing the chorus:

“She’s imperfect, but she tries

She is good, but she lies

She is hard on herself

She is broken but won’t ask for help

She is messy, but she’s kind

She is lonely, most of the time

She’s all of this mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie

She is gone, but she used to be mine.”

Like Sanson, Pilapil won singing competitions as a child before coming to Singapore. There's a faint, almost wistful pride she carries as she recalls that moment.

But unlike the protagonist in the song that she sings, she has learnt contentment. Since coming to Singapore, she's picked up a number of skills: baking, hairstyling, handicrafts.

She even picked up the guitar: "I was the best student," she says, fairly glowing as she recalls her time at the course.

And she does love her work. It's provided for her children, who are now grown and musicians in their own right. It has given her twin girls to care for, who she's looked after since they were just four months old, and who run to hug her whenever she comes home.

But singing is different. It's something innate to her — natural as breathing — that she's brought with her from home, and that she will keep with her wherever she goes.

Later, as I watch her during the choir lesson, her voice soars above the rest, strong and sweet. I can imagine her as a child in the Philippines, singing her heart out on a brightly-lit stage; and I imagine her, once again, as she is — but in the middle of the choir, at the front of a crowd, in a beautiful skirt she sewed herself.

It's a different life, but it's not a bad one. And watching her sing, I like to think she's perfectly content where she is.

Have something even more interesting going on in your neighbourhood? One-up us at [email protected].

Firsthand is a new content pillar by Mothership, featuring in-depth stories about people and their issues.

Top image from Alfie Kwa and Sing'theatre