Dear angels,

2 years ago today, a friend and I visited a shelter home to send a bundle of Enid Blyton books. During that outing, we spent time with the children and read them a book. On the way home, a strong desire was reawakened to organize all the welfare events that I used to do, but this time using Facebook!

In the decade before Helping Angels started, I experienced great difficulty getting people to join me for my welfare projects. All my friends were usually happy to spend money to help but most were not willing to make time to be present. Each time, I was the only one who brought a busload of children to watch movies with their administrators. If I had presents to give away, often I had to send them myself. Time and again, my efforts would burn out and I could only afford to reach out once a year. I found that writing the cheque was the easiest thing to do when it comes to doing charitable work.

With Facebook, my aspiration to share the joy of helping others was once again ignited and the projects I had created for Helping Angels quickly took off within the first week. Helping Angels is turning 2 years old on August 30th 2009. We place more importance on the people who aspires to donate their time. For people who has no time or are in places far away, we also devised the way to help without the talk of money. Does this hit a spot?

It is only fair that I thanked the creators of Facebook for providing us with such a useful and convenient internet tool. Without Facebook, Helping Angels will not exist, neither will all of us 1800 members across the world whom I regard as angels. Thank you all for joining and staying in the family. To collectively have the aspiration to help others, is a powerful movement, even if it is a quiet one.

For angels far away from our activities, please continue to give your support spiritually and share your resources! It means a lot to those who are volunteering in person to make this happen for the Helping Angels family. Let us continue to dedicate 2 hours each week to bring joy into our lives and those surrounding ourselves. If you want to start a project for your own locality, do write to me. In the last year, Helping Angels managed to branch out to create activities in Bangkok and Taipei. Throughout the year we also have angel members visit us in Kuala Lumpur from Boston, LA, Connecticut, New York, Germany, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Thailand, France, Netherlands (if I missed out your cities, please remind me).. It was a delight to meet you all. Some of us angels also exchanged Helping Angels postcards all over the world!

Angels in Kuala Lumpur :
Please keep abreast with our weekly Thursday Tutoring Program at the 3 homes. You will automatically be sent an invitation every time an event is being put up. One of the homes have moved, so please take note of address changes.

For the auspicious month of August, Helping Angels has a small feature in Malaysia Airlines In-Flight magazine Going Places to commemorate the Merdeka issue (Malaysia’s Independence Day August 31st). We will also be in the Sunday Times Merdeka issue on August 30th, 2009.

In the spirit of our group objectives to help others, we will be celebrating Helping Angels’ birthday by supporting another good cause – The No Plastic Bags campaign, on Merdeka Day itself – August 31st. All members are welcomed to attend this full day event. I will be doing a short song performance around 1330 and I would love to meet more angels, please come and say hello if you see me!

Love & Aspirations to All.

Yours, P