Eight in the morning, notebooks out
The training department called the session for 8:00 and the new members arrived first, which is usually how it goes. Notebooks, a couple of voice recorders, one camera. The first twenty minutes were deliberately unstructured — older members and newer ones getting to know each other before anyone had to concentrate.
The museum is a long-standing partner of the club and the staff walked us through the collection themselves, which is a considerable favour to a group of volunteers.
Three floors, three subjects
Women in the family
Wedding customs, the care given to women after childbirth, women's role in farming, and the worship of the Mother Goddess — a tradition that surprises most foreign visitors and that a guide has to be able to explain without turning it into folklore.
Women in wartime
This is the floor that stops people. Women who worked, raised families and fought. One letter in the collection was written by Vo Thi Tan to her mother days before she was killed in a bombing, and it describes the enemy lighting the road at night so the road crews could repair it and bombing the river by day so they had fish to eat. There is also a photograph of a bridge made of human bodies, used to carry wounded soldiers across a stream.
Clothing and craft
Traditional dress from several ethnic groups and the techniques behind it — decoration applied with beeswax, bracelets tied to the spirit of the wearer. The top floor holds a temporary exhibition; on our visit it was on Singaporean culture, seen through a round window that looks down over a ground floor hung with conical hats.
How the morning ended
We thanked the museum staff, then sat together to talk — the point being to close the gap between generations of members, which in a club with a two-year turnover is a real problem. The club president spoke about the early days, when the whole organisation was a handful of students with an idea.