I drove to Singapore at 4am on February 15th to send my film edits to the award winning movie composer. Melissa’s birthday was a few days before that and I had sent her a text to see if she had time to catch up for this trip.
Melissa invited me to stay the night so I could drive home the next morning. I offered to stay for Sunday church too.
“Everyday is church!” she said.
Her response reminded me of the life hack I need to model.
Melissa is an unusual human being. This was written about her.
“Melissa is a cross-cultural and cross-sector bridge-builder who enjoys raising leaders and catalysing partnerships for the greater good. An anthropologist by training, a possibilist by nature and a product of two entrepreneurial families, she is a serial ideator and catalyst enabling and co-founding numerous initiatives and championing their leaders and communities.”
I casually call her my favourite “social worker” of Singapore as a joke, but it also simply describes her humility. After spending 9 years levelling up the philanthropy movement in Singapore, Melissa becomes a resident in a HDB neighbourhood and frequently gathers the community for meals in her home.
“Melissa believes that genuine friendships are the purpose of life and is passionate about building communities where people can become their best selves. She is a resident of Singapore’s first planned neighbourhood Queenstown and serves on the board of her family enterprise, Pontiac Land Group.”
That Saturday night, she hosted an appreciation dinner for 3 cleaners from Bangladesh who takes care of the HDB blocks in Queenstown. Their names were Pragdev, Jahit & Shamim. Other neighbours joined in. It was an interfaith group – I paid close attention to how Melissa did church.
Halfway through my second plate of food, a noisy man busted into the house and announced that he was going back to jail the next day. Melissa gently invited him to take some food but he only wanted the wine. For a few minutes I got him to sit down next to me but as soon as he identified my yakuza straight talking, he went away. At least we got him to eat a little.
The evening lived up to the expectations of the unusual Melissa dinners I have heard much about. The learning was profound for me.
My key takeaway came before the guests arrived while we set the dinner table.
“Don’t tell people who is Jesus. Be Jesus.”
Like the Bible, her instructions are basic, but I have rarely seen it done. I can now model Melissa’s posture and try it myself.
When God put us back in touch last year, I have unconsciously followed in her footsteps and repaired my family home with the intention to serve the community. Our circumstances are different, but there are enough parallels to be drawn that inevitably makes her mentorship extremely applicable to my journey right now.
For starts, I have my own version of neighbourhood gangsters to tame and my Imbi smarts were handy in Queenstown.
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Now I want to talk about the true love of my life. It is not a romantic interest, it is a life calling. The desire for social impact makes me the curious cat who wants to solve problems. I innovate (sometimes with personal sacrifices) to make social impact an art form that can be easily scalable by any neighbourly-minded person.
I was not born with a weighted spoon in my mouth, but my life is charmed and my imaginations aren’t regular. Before the term “social impact” became widespread, I was a teenager with outrageous dreams in philanthropy. I knew I was designed for social impact.
First I was spoon-fed the taste of hell before God started to reveal my life purpose. By the time I turned 30, I had gone through more than my fair share of ups and downs. Reinventions after reinventions, I kept bouncing back from the ashes. Social impact got me out of my wheelchair and the hospital bed. It represented my will to live.
Since my mid-20s, I listed Melinda Gates as my role model. I was not alone, many girls from my peer group had set their sights on Melinda as the #1 person they most admire and would like to meet. Over the years I have met people who are division leaders in the Gates Foundation but I did not meet Melinda herself.
Philanthropy is a lofty ambition for someone who is not a trust fund baby. However, I could not stop innovating for social impact in whatever I was doing and I chased it globally.
Although my desire to meet Melinda eventually waned, my main occupation was inspired by her for almost 2 decades. Impact making was the persistent doodle that kept reincarnating itself on my drawing board. Each experiment brings me small successes and any failure would fuel newer versions. I would reinvent repeatedly and randomly everywhere I went.
To change the world I had to see the world. So I travel and engage in long conversations with brilliant minds. I make friends. We collaborate over small grass root projects for the love of it. Over time, I connect the dots and a peer group network naturally occur. I also cross the oceans to spend time with mentors.
My love bear fruits along the way and I am invited to speak about the social movements I created, and with the intersection of art. When I meet gifted innovators on global stages, each conversation would unlock new abilities for me.
It was on such a stage that I encountered Melissa for the first time in 2013 and I started to follow her the same way I followed Melinda Gates.
During the pandemic, my story took a 360 turn and I started to read the Bible from front to back repeatedly. My soul craved a higher breakthrough. I had not realised up till then that I was lost. As I embark on a new journey, I became eager to discard old ways.
We do not know what we do not know until we are finally shown it.
It was as if the clouds cleared, the path lit up and no one else could see it – I had to learn to walk again. I wanted a life hack to apply biblical principles into my enterprises but there were no role models. It took me a while to find a church community to belong to – I did not fit in easily.
Last year, I asked God to identify a mentor who was savvy in business leadership, legacy impact minded and applies biblical principles in secular dealings. Similar to the criteria around my future husband, this felt like another impossible ask. Forgetfully, I had to be reminded again that no task is so great that God cannot fulfil it.
Shortly afterwards Melissa invited me to her cute little home in a working class neighbourhood and gave me a Bible verse (Proverbs 3:3) marked on a gingko nut to take home with me. I had not seen her for 9 years and expected her to live in a much larger house, have servants at a posh address like her father.
God was humorous with His answers to my prayer. Melissa is more than what I could think of asking Him for in a mentor. She will challenge me to be uncommonly basic and to posture myself with the humility I can only imagine of Jesus.
2024 was the year I reshuffled my premises to cut down on overheads. I prepared myself for a daunting chapter ahead that would test my faith and put me through warfare. Melissa was my church.
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Melissa Aratani Kwee wears a lilac HarryPutter cap with pompom detail.