How we can do social work everyday

“Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.” – Plato

One aspect of social work is providing and showing dignity to a person. Showing dignity to a person affirms his or her value. And indeed each of us has intrinsic value, being made in the likeness of God. But the world sometimes educates us differently. It tells us only people who are successful, “the beautiful people” or the popular deserve our attention. The rest are not important. How easy it is for us to adopt that view and consciously or sub-consciously think a person is only of value if this person is successful, beautiful or popular. Deep down we know that is not right but we are guilty of adopting the same standards.

Let’s take it down to a most practical level. How do I treat my gardener? If you stay in a condominium or a gated community, do you acknowledge the guard when you drive through? When I take a ticket from the person who dispenses the PLUS toll ticket, do I nod to acknowledge presence? When you go to pump petrol and the petrol attendant cleans your windscreen, do you say, Terima Kasih? The foreign worker who serves our kopi-o at hawker stall, do we, through our words, body language or facial expression, treat him roughly? Our eyes do not meet, as almost to say, you are unworthy of even my fleeting glance, or what about the cleaning lady or the tea lady at our office?

Think for a moment. That gardener, that guard, that PLUS ticket dispenser, that petrol attendant, that foreign worker, the cleaning lady, the tea lady at our office, they are probably not having the time of their lives. With the meagre salary they receive and being dismissed as the “have-nots” of society, they are unlikely to be overflowing with happiness; in fact more likely the very opposite. For us upper middle class decent folk, like the Phil Collins song goes, “It’s just another day in paradise”. But what about them? What do they go home to? Plato says, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”

So how can I do social work every day?

I can start at the most basic and simplest level. I can bestow dignity to the not successful, the unattractive, the unpopular, the have-nots and not marginalized of society that I will surely meet every day. When we call out to the foreign worker, “Boss, satu the limau ais!” he knows and we know who is really the boss, but for that split moment, something has happened. You have restored his dignity. You have given him back a little bit of his dignity that the world has slowly but surely been taking away from him. Now human beings are complex and wired differently. There could be a myriad of reasons why we act the way we do, and often it is rooted in our sub-conscious. We ourselves are not aware why we act a certain way.

I now do social work every day.