Lucilla Teoh went to great lengths to be an international volunteer: physical training on an island with strangers, dealing with folks who didn’t think much of her efforts, a brush with death, and perhaps scariest of all, an encounter with a spiky nemesis.

Lucilla’s late father had encouraged her to sign up when the Singapore International Foundation (SIF) first made its call for Singaporeans to volunteer abroad in 1991.

She was adamant she wouldn’t be selected. Her father thought otherwise. “This is for you, it’s so you,” she recalls him saying.

So confident was he that he challenged her to eat durians - which she hated - if she got selected. So it was a bitter sweet moment when she found out she had been selected and would have to confront her thorny foe.

Lucilla, says her father not only believed in her and encouraged her, but also passed on his “if I can help, I will” philosophy.

Pioneer

To prepare for the one-year assignment as part of the SIF’s pioneer batch of overseas volunteers, she went through six months of training, including a series of language lessons and a trip to Pulau Ubin where she had to clear obstacles, spend a night on a deserted isle and dig her own toilet, to bond with the other volunteers.

Sent to teach English to children from shanty towns in Colombo who were being helped by local NGO Sevanatha (shelter, in Sinhalese), she faced a variety of challenges.

Not only did she have to grapple with cultural differences, she also had to contend with country-wide disturbances caused by the war the government was fighting against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which was seeking to establish an independent Tamil state.

One of the LTTE’s tactics was to use suicide bombers to assassinate political figures, often causing heavy civilian casualties as well.

War and resistance

And it was such an attack that Lucilla narrowly missed on 1 May 1993.

She was on her way home to change before attending a speech by the then Sri Lankan president, Ranasinghe Premadasa, when she noticed soldiers on the streets and helicopters circling above.

When she reached home, her landlady told her “all communications had been cut”.

Right then, she had a feeling that the president had been killed, a hunch later confirmed by a BBC radio bulletin.

The attack intensified the war, which went on from 1983-2009, and Lucilla could have suspended her assignment and returned to Singapore, but she chose to stay.

“Why should I have come home?” she says, adding that she was “seeing history being created” and felt Sri Lanka was “the place to be” – the English teacher also a student of history.

She did, however, assure her family members that she would “start packing” if she thought she couldn’t handle it anymore.

Aside from the war, she encountered resistance of another kind: older Sri Lankans who did not see the value of her teaching their children English, because they had been able to get by without learning the language.

“In one community they kept cancelling classes and not giving me a proper room,” she says.

But she did not give up, and managed to convince the leaders of that community to give her a room to teach the children in. Though it was only a storeroom, it was a permanent place, and that was enough for her.

“For me, international volunteerism is something for you to have a chance at a certain point in history to help a country along in her journey,” she says.

Not done yet

Now the corporate communications director for the Anglican Church in Singapore, Lucilla feels her volunteer experience renewed her commitment to education: to want “to teach and to teach well”.

And 20 years after she first volunteered with SIF, the 49-year-old shows no sign of slowing down.

Inspired to help children in less developed communities “so that they will be able to get on in their lives”, she pursued a master’s degree in theatre so she could create theatre programmes for such children.

“This is a dream and passion that has yet to come to pass fully. We'll see how things go. I still have some steam left.” 

* Main picture courtesy of Lucilla Teoh