Author

This is my story behind Aunty’s story…

Angeline Koh is the communications director for the Navigators Singapore.

Besides regularly publishing articles in the Singapore NavNews, her articles have also been featured in the New Paper, the TODAY paper, Chicken Soup for the Singapore Soul.

In November 2008, she was among 16 awarded the The Lifelong Learner Awards organised by MediaCorp Pte Ltd, Singapore Workforce Development Agency, NTUC, and SPRING Singapore. Angeline is part of the Writers Coffee Lounge - a small writers support group that have been meeting since 2006.

This is what she says…

I briefly came in contact with Aunty Say Bay as a young Navigator staff trainee in 1994. Over the years Navigator Asia Missions Director Jim Chew had often told me each time we met, “I wish someone could document the life of Aunty Say Bay.”

After returning from a two-year stint overseas in 1998, I was reassigned by The Navigators to handle communications. Although I knew by then that I was created with an innate passion to communicate, I couldn’t see myself sitting behind the desk so much of the time. I thought, “But I’m too young! Let me write when I am old. I still have a lot of life to live.”

How wrong I was to think that writers sit behind the desk! Writers go chasing after stories. They meet people. They draw people out to talk and make them see and feel things they have never seen or realised they feel. They pull things together and make sense of a jigsaw puzzle. They observe and listen and see things other people don’t. They crystallise concepts and ideas. They make the unseen seen. Writers need a lot of passion and energy. Certainly that has been my experience in writing Aunty’s story.

I am very grateful indeed to be given the privilege to write it. It is hard to spend time with Aunty SB and not feel the impact of her intimate and childlike walk with God.

I commend to you Aunty SB’s valuable, historical, anthropological, researched documentation of the Moken Sea Gypsies – an attempt to preserve the fading culture of a small people group numbering 2,000 only, and the story of her life sacrifice to bring to them their Book.

May you be inspired and challenged as I have been.

Angeline Koh

Published by NavMedia Singapore
ISBN 978-981-05-8686-7

For more info, please contact angeline_koh [at] yahoo.com

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