Champion of nature and nurture: NMP Faizah Jamal

Environment NMP Faizah Jamal's challenge is to bring the fringe ideals of tree-huggers into the mainstream
Clarissa Oon Straits Times 2 Jul 12;

One of Parliament's newest faces, Ms Faizah Jamal is also one of the very few Singaporeans over 50 who still lives in the house they were born in.

The petite Nominated Member of Parliament for the environment - one of nine NMPs sworn in this February - is waiting for you at the top of the stairs on the second floor of a Kampong Glam shophouse. It has been in her family for three generations.

Her late grandfather and father were diamond traders who came here from Banjar in south Kalimantan, now part of Indonesia. The family used to occupy both floors of the shophouse, but a few years ago, Ms Faizah and her two teenage daughters rented out the ground floor to an art gallery.

'It's just the three of us and we don't need so much space,' explains the single mother, a former corporate lawyer-turned-polytechnic lecturer.

Their light-filled, L-shaped home consists of just two rooms and a kitchenette, but opens out onto a rooftop garden where they can gaze over the roofs of neighbouring shophouses and watch the sun set. The apartment has no air-conditioning, in keeping with her climate-friendly beliefs.

A newcomer to civil society leadership, the 52-year-old hopes to harness her diverse interests in nature, heritage and education to champion the importance of being more connected to the land.

She is the first female Malay NMP since the scheme started in 1990 to bring more alternative voices into Parliament.

An adjunct lecturer in environment education at the Republic Polytechnic, she was nominated for the NMP position by the Nature Society. She has been a member since 1984 and edited the society's quarterly magazine from 2008 to 2009.

Outspoken yet oozing hospitality and graciousness, Ms Faizah has made a career out of following her heart and not fitting into any mould.

Back in the late 1980s, as a young intellectual property lawyer with top law firm Drew & Napier, she was an avid trekker and mountain-climber, scaling volcanoes in Lombok, Sumatra and Java.

'I would take off for three weeks to climb mountains, to the horror of everyone. They said: 'Nobody takes three weeks off from a law firm, what are you doing?',' she recalls with a breezy laugh.

'That was how this interest in nature came up, when you are confronted with nature at its rawest,' says the Raffles Girls' School alumna and National University of Singapore (NUS) law graduate.

Through some of her treks in the Malaysian jungles, she befriended many indigenous orang asli villagers and became inspired by the simple life they led in harmony with nature.

This led to her pursuing a master's in environment law at Kings College, London in the early 1990s, on a European Community-Asean scholarship given out by the British Council.

In 2003, after ending her marriage to her consultant husband, she gave up law altogether to become an environment educator and holistic consultant. She is a certified practitioner of Breathwork, a form of breathing therapy to deal with stress and life crises, and still conducts occasional classes at outdoor nature retreats and for charitable organisations.

While most of her work today centres on teaching polytechnic students how to appreciate nature, as well as preparing for parliamentary sittings once a month, she conducts the occasional heritage tour around her Kampong Glam neighbourhood, which she knows like the back of her hand. A former volunteer museum guide, she does these tours at the request of the Asian Civilisations Museum for its docent trainees.

The third of four siblings who grew up in Kampong Glam in the 1960s and 1970s, she misses the community spirit of the past. The shophouses in the area - historically an Malay and Arab settlement - are now occupied mainly by shops and restaurants, unlike before when people lived and worked there.

'We used to know every single neighbour, and this particular street where I live had not just Malay but also Chinese and Indian residents. There used to be an Indian tailor down the road as well as a Chinese provision shop.

'All the kids would play together. I could hear Hokkien and Teochew all around me - even now I can understand a bit - and there was always a Rediffusion set blaring from one of the shophouses,' she recalls, a nostalgic look in her eyes.

'If you talk to any Singaporean from my generation, I think it's that spirit which we are lacking now. We are creating it but it's a bit artificial somehow. Back then, it was organic and there was no feeling of 'I'm Chinese' or 'you're Malay' or whatever,' she adds.

From the 1980s, many of her neighbours began moving out and their children did not take over their businesses.

Neither Ms Faizah nor her siblings - who went into different professions such as medicine and teaching - carried on her late father Ahmad Jamal's diamond business, and she is the only one who still occupies the shophouse. Her 75-year-old mother, Madam Hajjah Fatimah, lives with her youngest sister in the east.

She says her passion for Kampong Glam is 'not just because I'm Malay, but also because of my family history. And it's Singapore's history as well'.

In a similar vein, she says she was floored when asked by Malay journalists earlier this year what Malay-Muslim issues she was going to raise in Parliament. This is because to her, the environmental issues she represents cut across race and affects all Singaporeans.

'It's not that I'm not concerned about Malay issues, but surely the time has come for us to move away from the idea of 'Malay issues' or 'women's issues' and to see them as issues that affect society at large,' she says.

One issue she hopes to champion is of nature and the outdoors as a space where values such as national identity and character-building can be taught. It was the subject of her maiden parliamentary speech in February, and she will continue to push for students to get a more hands-on experience of nature.

As an environment education lecturer for the past four years, she has noticed that her polytechnic students have had little previous exposure to nature and wildlife reserves such as Bukit Timah or Sungei Buloh.

'Often, at the end of a walk that I facilitate, the words that come out of their mouths are 'I've never been so awed in my life' or 'I never knew Singapore had such things'.

'And here we keep on saying Singapore has no natural resources, Singapore's not exciting. When the word 'awe' comes up from these 20-year-olds, to me, that means something and can be built on,' she says with conviction.

Another issue she hopes to address is what she calls the 'myth' that there can be 'economic growth at all costs at the expense of the environment'.

Over-consumption, she thinks, is rampant in today's affluent, use-and-throw culture. As long as society is untroubled by this, 'how is recycling ever going to be successful', she wonders.

To her, the challenge of being an environment NMP with only a 2 1/2-year term is to bring the fringe ideals of tree-huggers into the mainstream. As she puts it: 'People know intellectually that the environment is a good thing, but how can I make it speak to their hearts?'

Nature Society president Shawn Lum has known her for 15 years, as fellow members of one of the country's oldest non-governmental organisations. He says he was impressed with her 'extensive first-hand experience with nature, incredibly wide range of intellectual and interpersonal skills, and an approach to life that is equal parts curiosity, celebration and reverence'.

He says the group nominated her as an NMP 'because we felt that she would be able to demonstrate just how powerful and meaningful a role nature and the environment can have in the lives of people'.

Few people have such a multi-faceted approach to green issues from a legal, holistic as well as educational perspective, says another society member, NUS environmental law professor Lye Lin Heng. But she believes Ms Faizah will also be able to speak about 'issues that relate to the common man'. In this respect, she cites the NMP's past volunteer experiences working with ex-drug addicts and kidney and cancer patients and their families, and being a devoted mother to two well-rounded daughters.

Azura, 18, and Almira, 16 - two slim, long-haired teenagers who love music and the arts and have a perceptiveness beyond their years - are their mother's pride and joy. Azura is in her second year of junior college at Raffles Institution, while her sister is a fourth-year student at the School of the Arts.

The threesome are close, as the girls have lived with their mother ever since their parents' divorce more than 10 years ago. 'Among the three of us, everything is a shared decision. If the girls didn't think I should take up the NMP position, I wouldn't have,' says Ms Faizah.

Azura says her mother tends to always speak her mind, and 'not just in terms of the big issues, but if something is not right, like when someone is being dishonest'. And yet, 'she'll speak up in a way that doesn't offend people - which is probably why you got the NMP job', says the 18-year-old with a cheeky sideways glance at Ms Faizah.

Almira has a different take on what her mother's defining trait is. 'I've always seen her as very spiritual, in touch with her feelings and with nature. It's all over the house, it's how we've been brought up,' she says. Books on nature and New Age spirituality are piled on the desk of her mother's bedroom, which also doubles as the family lounge.

Ms Faizah says the family is Muslim, 'but I've learnt from a lot of religions, including the orang asli'. She believes that 'there is a higher force in the natural world that we are all connected to', and has taken her daughters on jungle treks and visits to orang asli villages from the time they were in preschool.

The inter-connectedness of everything in life 'behooves us to be careful of what we think and say, because it has an effect. If you're negative, pessimistic, then what you get is more negativity'.

Her guiding mantra can be summed up in a road sign she spotted a few years ago while on holiday in London, which read: 'You are not stuck in traffic, you ARE traffic.' She liked it so much, she took a photograph of it and it is now on her Facebook profile page.

Ultimately, whether the issues are social, environmental or personal, she believes in taking responsibility rather than blaming others. 'It's about seeing life from a perspective that is abundant and from there, other things flow,' she says.