More young S'poreans volunteering at museums

Mr Dinesh Sathisan, a defence policy officer at the Ministry of Defence, volunteers at the Peranakan Museum. He gets satisfaction from guiding, knowing that someone has learnt something about the history of Singapore. -- ST PHOTO: KEVIN LIM

Volunteer museum guide Dinesh Sathisan, 31, has a favourite bed at the Peranakan Museum.

It belonged to a couple from Penang, who left it behind when they moved to Singapore. Unfortunately, traditional beliefs stated that the wife should give birth on the bed where the marriage was consummated.

So it resulted in a series of trips back to Penang whenever a baby was due. Eventually, they decided it was easier to move the bed to Singapore.

Mr Dinesh, who works at the Ministry of Defence, never fails to raise a chuckle when he tells that story to museum visitors.

And the satisfaction of knowing that someone has learnt something about this place's history is why he is one of a growing group of young Singaporeans who are volunteer museum guides.

Museum Volunteers, their coordinator, says almost all its new recruits are Singaporean, and more than half are in their 20s and 30s.

They work in fields like education, finance, real estate, energy, IT, law and health care.

And they willingly give up at least one weekend a month to be guides, without pay.

'It's really addictive!' says Ms Avril Tan, 33, who works in regional sales at a bank and has been a guide at the Singapore Art Museum for four years. 'It's a lot of fun because everyone has a different interpretation of the artwork.'

Guides say they are inspired by historians who make the past come alive on their study weekends.

'We had some fascinating lecturers, like Associate Professor Bruce Lockhart from NUS (National University of Singapore), who could explain South-east Asian politics in Sang Nila Utama's time way better than anyone,' says new volunteer Tan Yew Guan, 39, a producer at Channel NewsAsia and a guide at the Asian Civilisations Museum.

Each volunteer signs up for a particular museum, attends about 20 weekend classes with tests, and commits to leading a tour once a month for a year after graduation. Of the 72 who last applied, 41 made it all the way through.

But more than 60 of Museum Volunteers' 168 active guides have stayed for five years or more.

There are other docents with Friends of the Museums who guide on weekdays.

Young people have become more concerned about preserving their heritage, said university executive Low Zhiqi, 25, pointing to the recent active interest over saving the Bukit Brown Cemetery and Tanjong Pagar Railway Station.

Ms Low, who is a guide at the Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall, says: 'Singapore is a forward-looking city, and sometimes we forget there is a past. But we should treasure connections between the past and the future.'

Museum Volunteers president Ma Swan Hoo, 55, says volunteers help the tourism industry by promoting the museums. 'And they help our local population learn about our own culture,' she adds.

Friends of the Museums and Museum Volunteers are recruiting volunteers. Send an e-mail message to info@fom.sg (for those who want to volunteer on weekdays) or museumvolsingapore@gmail.com (weekend volunteers) to find out more.

FAR FROM BORING

His friends said museums were dusty and boring. To prove them wrong, Mr Dinesh Sathisan, a National University of Singapore history major, signed up as a volunteer guide.

Then 24 years old, he was the youngest guide in his batch to be trained at the Asian Civilisations Museum in 2005. Up to today, the 31-year-old defence policy officer relishes the stories behind the museum's artefacts.

Visitors are often captivated by a bronze-cast statue of the Hindu goddess Uma. So he tells them how the god Shiva was so similarly entranced that he made her his wife.

HOOKED FROM THE START

Ms Deanna Rashid's first visit to the Asian Civilisations Museum was a night-time foray in 2010 at the behest of a German friend, who said tickets were half-price at night. She was immediately hooked.

There was no guide so the 36-year-old recruiter at an oil and gas firm relied on the descriptions, but she enjoyed the experience enough to go back a second time. She also signed up to become a guide with Museum Volunteers.

Last month, she became one of the museum's 41 new weekend guides, after half a year of training. She can now identify different Buddha statues and trace their artistic influences to 1,000-year-old exchanges between India, Cambodia, China and Vietnam.

'I really wanted to be an ambassador for our South-east Asian heritage,' she says.