Seeing how Mme Lim is now, being cheerful and boisterous, you would never have thought how much she had suffered when she was younger. Having a father who was a heavy drinker and gambler, Mme Lim never had an easy childhood. She was forced to stop studying after primary school education as her father would either spend money on alcohol or gamble every cent away. At a young age of 12, she had to follow her mother out to work to help support the family. She would help her mother in the kitchen to prepare food, then bringing baskets of food that was prepared to sell. She too had to pick up the responsibility to look after the chickens that they reared, ensuring that the snakes would not attack the chickens. Many times she had witnessed snakes going near the chickens, and had to shout for help so that her mother could help her with luring the snakes away. All she did in her teen years were to help out in the family, hoping that her younger siblings could do what she never got to, to at least finish secondary school education. What she did, was never enough, her father would constantly ask for money to feed his gambling addiction. Although she hated his behaviour, there was nothing she could do with it but put up with her father’s addiction for years. She resented her father for being the cause of their predicament. What she disliked more was having to watch her family being looked down upon by neighbours and the kids her siblings had met in school. Relatives too, had started to shun them. Nobody liked being associated with a gambler, what more one who would shamelessly go around borrowing money, increasing the debt of the family. Despite all the resentment Mme Lim had against her family, she had never thought of abandoning her family. She wanted to do all she can for the family. She didn’t want her siblings to suffer the same fate that she did. And that thought changed, when what she had never expected happened. “My father threa