Above all else

The past couple of weeks/months have been really busy - leading a team offsite at work and re-examining team dynamics after a turbulent 2021-22, preparing for and attending my church AGM as council member for the first time, visiting friends at our rental block neighbourhood, re-starting our overseas work with a school/orphanage in a nearby country now that Covid-19 restrictions have diminished, spending time trying to guide and support new cell leaders in our church family, and going out with young/new friends on the weekends... As I was walking home with my wife yesterday evening, I couldn't help but reflect with her on the life journey that led us to this point - WHAT HAPPENED THERE??  I am very much an introvert by nature. When I started work, all I wanted to do was to be a technical specialist and solo worker. I rather vainly thought I was really good at the technical skills in my profession, and had even won a competition for that in University, so, just leave me alone to do

The news network CNN has an interesting tool on its website called the Global Wage Calculator, which you can use to benchmark your annual income both locally and globally.  Singapore's median annual income in 2021 was S$56k. If you punch this number into the Global Wage Calculator, it will show you that that's higher than the average annual wage for the US, Germany, Canada, France, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and far more than all our regional peers (even adjusted for purchasing power parity). It is 2.3 times the global average wage, 5x of a driver in South Africa, 7x of a cleaner in Thailand, and 14x that of an Ethiopian teacher. Of the world's population of almost 8 billion people, 30% do not have access to safe drinking water. That's 2.4 billion, a little less than the populations of China and India combined. 13% of the global population also doesn't have access to electricity.  9%, or 700m people, live in what is defined as extreme poverty i.e. less t