dishwasher for a duck-rice stall during my school holidays. With a free meal and free take-home leftovers every day, the kindly wife of the duck-rice seller was to me an angel.

All that time, Mum taught us by example not to ask for help if we could help ourselves. She forged on resourcefully and never once beg or borrow in our needy circumstances. There were dark days for my mum too, of course. That's when we children saw our own helplessness when she crumbled into sadness and moods. But arising she would and raise a heartbeat stronger to help us see the less able and less fortunate around us. I can still hear her say, "Why want help if we can help ourselves? That help should be reserved for others worse off than ourselves."

That's my dear mum and that's how mum understood self-help. She relinquished her place in the queue for public relief and worked out our own problems for ourselves. Self-help to her is compassion in essence, while 'helping self' is self-sufficiency imbued with the dignity and fortitude and vibrancy of hard and honest work.

And so it was then - a place in time forever - a family of eight, a rabbit and some chicks and a fighting fish shared a home and got along. Some years on, we even took to feeding the poor stray cats and dogs in our neighbourhood. We never allowed ourselves to degenerate into a vapid pool of self-pity nor turned ourselves into miserly souls craving over money; a miracle, one would say. But truly, my mum was the miracle worker.

She gave us the all-important ability to see beyond ourselves and by doing so unconsciously laid for us the ground for idealism - for questioning - for sharpening our edge of awareness about the world and stoved in us an acute sense of injustice whenever fairplay is undermined. She gave us the ability to feel for others and happily we still do.

At the present age of forty-eight years, my heart still pains to see old uncles and aunties rummaging painstakingly through filthy dustbins for aluminium drink cans that they could sell to the recycling-man for a few precious cents.

The contrasting figures of able-bodied men or women begging in the streets, on the other hand, would fill me with indignation. Mum would have put it succinctly - "left hand begs, right hand earns". Such a paradigm presented itself in the form of the multi-million-dollar earner Singapore Zoo and its donation-collecting sidekick Wildlife Conservation Singapore Fund (WCSF) on Flag Day 26 Aug 2007. The revelation turning its head barely a week after the National Day Rally proved exceedingly disconcerting.

Was it not validation of self-help at its best when our Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong singled out 91-year-old Madam Lee Siew Lan for her intrepid spirit of self-dependency? He exuberated at the Rally, "So this is the spirit you want not just in 91-year-olds but in 51-year-olds and 31-year-olds and 21-year-olds too!"

What spirit then are we asking our younger generation to look up to? Tenacity and determination to win medals or to get what we want with whatever means possible? The 'fighting spirit' per se... for survival? Indeed, no.

The spirit is a vessel of values; values encompassing principles, dignity, moral courage, character and heart, and the sense of sacrifice beyond self. Self-help is by no means thus a social-economic solution that we are passing to the next generation. Rather it is the passing of a precious value-system for the wholeness of being we all want our children to become. Madam Lee Siew Lan and my dear mum are role models to emulate, not the Singapore Zoo. It failed not only on the yardstick of goodwill but of moral principles.

Mahatma Gandhi once said that "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated". He also put forth the Seven Evils of Society and admonished us to avoid "Politics without principles; wealth without work; pleasure without conscience; knowledge without character; commerce without morality; science without humanity; worship without sacrifice."

There is a whole lot of good things we can teach our kids.

Parents, teach your kids to take personal responsibility for nature conservation. Teach them not to depend on others to do it for them. Impress on them that each and everyone of us is a steward of our environment. And together we can all teach the super-rich Singapore Zoo not to depend on other people's money for education, research and conservation. Tell the zoo put its own money where the mouth is and authenticate its own existence. Otherwise, whatever it preaches about nature conservation is just a farce - no genuine commitment. In any case, the zoo should never be seen as the status quo for animal conservation.

Last but not least, teach our children about true compassion. Self-help is helping others. My mum would have said it succinctly again, "one less Flag Day for the zoo, one more Flag Day for other non-profit organisations like the Children Society."