Email from Hazrul

E-mail from Hazrul, a 20 years old who had lived in Hougang for 16 years.

I am Hazrul Azhar Jamari, a 20 yr old who has been living in Hougang for 16 years. I currently reside in Sengkang. Here are some statistical data about Hougang you and your students may be surprised to know. The biggest HDB estate is Hougang with a total land size of 1276 hectares. Tampines and Woodlands come next.

Hougang Town used to have 3 mosques. Now, there are 2. 1 was demolished in 1999 to make way for a new one in Serangoon.The mosque was situated beside the Woodbridge Jungle, beside the compound of Woodbridge Hospital. It was the oldest mosque standing in Hougang up to 1999. The name of the mosque was Masjid Othmaniah. Hougang has 3 churches,Bethasda, CHIJ and Nativity. I'm only counting the ones I know. There may be smaller ones situated near the private housing area. Hougang is also home to 3 buddish/taoist temples. 2 of them are adjacent to each other and is situated at Hougang Ave 3.

Hougang is the only town split by political territories. a substantial part of Hougang residents are supporters of the Workers Party. They formed the Hougang SMC. The rest of Hougang is owned by Aljunied GRC and Punggol-Pasir Ris GRC. Hougang is home to 1 Junior College, 9 Secondary Schools and countless primary schools. It is also quite a challenge to keep a tab on the number of kindergarten and pre-schools. The neighbourhood mosque itself, provides pre-school, kindergarten and part-time madrasah education, as well as mature education services.Hougang is also home to one of the most advanced medical facilities in the country- the famous Woodbridge Hospital, the Institute of Mental Health. It is also home to Hougang Polyclinic and general practitioners in the town are in almost every nook and corner of Hougang.

Hougang is traditionally a power house in school sports and CCA. Bartley Secondary was a respected soccer powerhouse. Xinghua Primary, were once Serangoon Division champions and its best performance was reaching the quarterfinals at National level. Xinghua also churned out badminton champions during the 80's. Currently, Monfort and Xinmin Sec are powerhoused in Badminton and Volleyball. Bartley was the first school to implement the NPCC programme. Bowen Secondary is a school respected for its military band, which has consistently shown good performances and had several times been crowned champions. Hougang's satellite mosque, En-Naeem Mosque, which I serve as the Treasurer of the Youth wing, hosted the first ever Young Muslim Games (which I was chairman of) and finished a respectable third behind Al-Falah Mosque (Orchard Road), and Madrasah Aljunied out of 19 mosques, madrasahs and malay/muslim organisations islandwide.

Historically, Hougang used to be a pig farm before urbanisation. I heard this from my parents. You'd have to find an elderly who would know better than me about its historical aspects. Hougang is also home to the Paya Lebar military airbase and Hougang Landfield is right beside the Tampines Expressway. Hougang landfielf serves as the rubbish disposal for the island.I think, I can tell you so much about Hougang. Please refer to these links for some useful information about Hougang and its achievements.http://www.hougang.org.sg/http://www.sg/flavour/top-house.htmlhttp://www.hougang%20people.org.sg/indexframes.htmlhttp://redcross.org.sg/news/local/27dec00.htmhttp://www.sg/home/towncouncil.htm
Life in Hougang may have changed a bit. when I was a lot younger, you'd find many children playing all sorts of games at the neighbouring basketball court, traditional and contemporary. Now, it seems that the children are glued to their gameboys and PC. I don't think that's a healthy change, even though I may be a web developer and stuck in front of my PC for a good 16 to 20 hours daily.

The area around the Woodbridge area was famous for the Ang Sung Tong gang back in the late 90's. But is safer now with the NPC around. I've seen less patrols in the area.Do you know Fandi Ahmad used to play at the Woodbridge ground with his friends? The old Yio Chu Kang Primary was his Primary school then. He was also an old boy of Serangoon Secondary. Sadly, only Bartley has been able to continue Hougang's proud football tradition. Some schools here ban soccer, namely my former secondary school - XinMin Secondary. It was sad, because we had some national age group players in our school, but its just too bad they were not able to show their talents due to the ban. Its a good sign though that our Sengkang Marine FC have shown performances to signal the comeback of Hougang soccer. Our mosque team is sadly a team with talent but perrenial underachievers. We've so far only managed 4th in a soccer competition a few years back.

My education began with PAP Kindergarten at Lorong Ah Soo near Hougang Ave 1. The area was Chinese majority so we had to take Mandarin lessons even though I am ethnically a Maly. I didn't do too well for Mandarin because I found it impractical at that tender age to be using it as I was more used to using English with my Chinese friends, and regarded Malay as my main language. Like some Malays, I had to go to 2 schools. One was the PAP Kindergarten and the other was the mosque kindergarten which I attended in the afternoon where I learned other things like supplications, how to love God, how to love my parents, how to respect my teachers, and they basically teach about the same thing as PAP Kindergarten, but that value-added education was what made mosque kindergarten life so memorable. We had frequent visits outside of the classrooms, we were allowed to play at the neighbouring playground, and the kindergarten often organise trips to the zoo and bird park. PAP kindergarten never offered such an exciting and meaningful education. I pulled the best results here, finishing 1st in class in K1. Life for a Malay child, well some of us anyway, was a lot of schooling I guess. It continued for the next 10 years of my life.

I attended Xinghua Primary which was the biggest primary school at that time along with Paya Lebar Methodist Girls Primary. And as per normal, if I attended lessons in the morning, I would continue my schooling at the mosque in the afternoon, twice a week. School was fun. Before, during recess and after school, the in thing was playing traditional games. We played hopscotch, which was one of the most popular, as well as "chap teh", five stones, catching etc. Unknown to many non-Malays, hopscotch, "chap teh" and five stones are actually traditional Malay games dating back centuries. Canteen food was cheap then. When I was in Pri. 1 to 3, I was given 50 cents as my allowance. I didn't have a wallet then and my coins were kept in my hankie, tied into a bundle. It was how my parents lived when they were my age. They had no luxury to buy wallets for thermselves, and they continued this tradition, to teach me the value of being satisfied with what you have at the moment while it last. I was the only one amongst my siblings to be trained this way, and all the more important too since I am the eldest. I had the responsibility of taking care of my siblings and had to show them the right examples.When I reached Pri 6, I experienced the best Singaporean dessert before it went extinct. The neighbouring Yuying Secondary's drink stall sold this dessert called ice-ball. It cost a dollar for one ice-ball. Ice-ball is something like ice-kacang, but the difference is that, there's no corn on this ice. the vendor would blend some ice into the ice-kachang blender and he/she would mould it into a ball. Then the vendor would spray different syrups on it, green syrup, red syrup and milk. We ate it from our hands, and yes, it was one of those stuff which would melt in your hands. It was icky, but tasty, and I often made regular trips across the border just to taste some. You can't get ice-ball anywhere in Hougang except Yuying Sec, and now that dessert is gone from existence. The dessert actually dated back to the 40's if I'm not wrong. I finally entered Xin Min Sec, and this was to be my final time of innocence.