This is a story no one wants to tell. (Ed. note: I just can’t even).
Armed with face masks and pesticides, more than 50 of Singapore’s most courageous souls braved an elderly man’s filthy, roach-infested flat at Block 5 Beach Road to jump up and down, stomping the hell out of the writhing mass of pests.
It was just the latest project for a group of volunteers who’ve taken on some of Singapore’s nastiest homes before, according to the fearless person who posted a video of it and said they’d previously cleared another home of roaches as well as one filled with rats.
“Last two weeks, we cleaned up House of Cockroach. Last week we cleaned up House of Mickey Mouse. Today, we cleared up the Kingdom of Cockroaches,” a volunteer of the Keeping Hope Alive community group wrote in the caption of one of several videos posted to the page on Sunday’s cleaning outing.
“We, the volunteers of Keeping Hope Alive, instead of freaking out at the thousands of cockroaches, we enjoyed ourselves by tap-dancing our way to a clean and pest-free home for this old uncle.”
He did not reveal the age of the resident of the flat or how long he had lived there, which had what looked like hundreds of cockroaches crawling on the floors and walls. Plastic bags of stuff and all sorts of rubbish were seen strewn all over the residence, and it was difficult to see the floor tiles or the walls.
Did they use pesticides or some kind of high-tech roach execution technology?
No, they did not. Volunteers, wearing white T-shirts, screamed and stomped about in the home trying to smash all the roaches their feet could find, videos showed. They were following the instructions of their exalted leader Fion Phua, who is the group’s founder.
In one clip, a man in red, which looked like he was the flat’s resident, is seen going through the discarded items outside his flat. Perhaps looking for his favorite roach.
Fortunately, the “after” footage found the flat looking spic and span after the cleaning, and the volunteers seemed happy with their accomplishment.
Their next spring cleaning session happens Sunday at another flat at Block 90 Pipit Road in Macpherson.
“There is no salary and no glory in volunteer work. We do it because it is right and it helps us become a better person. We do good just by doing good,” Sng wrote yesterday in another post.
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