The Hidden Side of Singapore

It is 7pm, the evening is a gloomy blue hue. At a back alley, sandwiched between Geylang and Sim’s Drive, wrinkled old men and women push makeshift trolleys, which grind upon the asphalt, stacked with cardboard, empty soft drink cans into a ramshackle industrial lot. I watch as the old man strains to get his load across a protrusion on the ground. That heavy pile of newspapers and cardboard is dinner as I watch money change hands, the green of a $5 bill. And it burns my heart.