Serve, Learn & Lead with Raymond Tay

Community Engagement Programme (CEP)

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the Community Engagement Programme (CEP) for Community Leaders under Ministry of Home Affairs. From this programme, I had gained a greater awareness of different religious & perspectives and got closer experience with Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) on their operation. This CEP aims to maintain our social cohesion & harmony, strengthen inter-communal bonds and put in place response plans to help deal with potential communal tensions after an accident (e.g. a terrorist attack).

It was my first time stepping into a mosque (place: An-Nahdhah @ Bishan) and very surprised to know that there’s a Harmony Centre that provides venue to host events like CEP and Inter-Faith Dialogue. During the tour in the mosque, it was informative and I got to know more about Islam & Muslim culture (e.g. Prophet Mohammed, Zhen He, praying practices, meaning of halal & fasting).

There are ten religions registered in S’pore: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Sikhism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Baha’I and Jainism. Interestingly, the mosque has a small corner that educate people on other 9 religions.

As the selection group of people are from various religious groups and with different beliefs, we had discussions to share our views and ideas about religions and how we can help our people or the community as a leader in peace time or crisis time. An interesting concept that I’ve learnt is “Agree to Disagree” and it means we agree together that there will be moments for us to accept disagreements.

One participant shared that there were once when their Buddhist society displayed a word, “Buddhism”, using sweets to encourage students who were mugging for exams and allow them to take the sweets. However, there was an unknown person who messed up that word and used a marker and wrote “Christianity Rocks!”. This really annoyed their society and this showed an insensitive & immature act. Thus hope different religion believers will respect other religions.

In the afternoon, we had the chance to visit the Civil Defence Academy and the Chief Instructor & his team highlighted how SCDF has grown & innovated over time to provide ready & effective search & rescue operations in local & overseas. SCDF has also partnered with schools & tertiary institutions (e.g. Singapore Polytechnic) to set up National Civil Defence Cadet Corps (NCDCC) and Lionhearters to allow students to learn & be prepared for any emergency/crisis. We had a tour into their training site and experienced the heat & fire danger (esp. fire on the ceiling) in a building. After going through it, we should not be playing fire. =)

Enjoy a short clip about CEP: