Usually during Ramadhan, I always get contributions from various donors to be distributed to the poor families among my clients. This year is no different. The amount of cash that came in this year was more than RM5.7K, and that doesn’t include contributions of groceries and diapers.
I’ve been distributing the contributions, in cash or in kinds, to at least 21 different families. I’ve still got a few more families to go, with less than RM1K balance in hand. For some of the families, I visit them at home to hand over the contributions. However, I can’t afford to go to the homes of each and every client, particularly those who stay quite far from Ipoh, and so for some I distribute the cash by banking into their accounts.
Tomorrow I will be meeting up with Wani to get my orders of Raya cookies from her. She usually gives me samples before Ramadhan to enable me to help get orders for her. But I had never been a business-minded person, so going around looking for orders is out of my league.
But since I do usually go around giving Raya cookies to a few of my clients, I made it a point to order the cookies from Wani. To me it’s a win-win situation, I get to help Wani with her business while at the same time make some contributions to some of my other clients.
Some of those cookies will go to Fuzi’s family. I do plan to visit them this week, as the latest news I got from Fuzi is that she has already got a confirmation letter from Jabatan Pendaftaran Negara to enable her youngest son, Iwan, to register for school. Iwan is already 9 years old this year but has not been able to go to school in view of his citizenship status. You see, Fuzi is an Indonesian citizen. While her older 4 children are Malaysian citizens by virtue of having a Malaysian father (although there were problems initially because the marriage was still not registered in Malaysia when their father died), Iwan had a different problem because he was born out of a rape case. Iwan’s birth cert indicated his father’s info as “Maklumat Tidak Diketahui”, and with Fuzi still unable to get PR status even though she had applied numerous times, Iwan was unable to register at any of the Malaysian government schools.
Now that matter is settled, we now need to register him for school as soon as possible. He had already missed 2 1/2 years of school because of all the problems. Hopefully after this the boy’s future will be brighter.
