Collin Ng's Blog

I met up a secondary schoolmate for lunch recently and we started reminiscing the good old days when we were running in marathon events as students.  If I can recall, there were not many run or walk events in the 70s.  There was this New Nation Walk that I can still remember.  I think the walk distance was 5 km and when we finished, we were given a completion certificate without our name - we just have to write our name on it. Mobile Marathon was the most prominent run event, perhaps the equivalent of Standard Chartered Marathon of present time.  The event came in 4 stages - first quarter run for 10 km in early part of the year, second quarter run for 20 km in second part of the year, third quarter run for 30 km in the third quarter of the year and finally, the full marathon distance of 42km in the last quarter of the year.  I ran that event with my classmates and we were just 15-year old jackasses.  That year was 1977.  We had no idea what carbo l...

Group picture taken with the children   Sometime in March last year, I made my first trip to Baan Dada Children's Home in Thailand.  It was a cycling tour organised by Nick where some of us flew to Bangkok from Singapore and together with an enthusiastic group of cyclists from Thailand, we cycled some 360 km over 3 days to the rugged western region that borders between Thailand and Myanmar.  It was a personal fund raising project for the purpose of setting up a vocation training centre at the home.  I met both Dada Rama who hails from the Philippines and his assistant, Dada Prashanta who hails from Indonesia in person for the first time.  Both "Dadas" (brothers in Sanskrit) have pledged their entire lives to help a worthy cause and they do not draw any salary at all.  Their worldly mission is to give love to the less fortunate ones - the kind of sacrifice not many can do it.   The muddy path just outside the home Dada Rama has been involve...