SINGAPORE – For close to two years while studying at Innova Junior College, Mr Faaqih Hilmy Gozan’s daily lunch was a packet of white rice with soy sauce or chilli, and the occasional egg.

The student was so embarrassed by his meagre meals that he would hide from his friends to eat, he said.

But it was all his family could afford.

Mr Hilmy’s father, their sole breadwinner, had been retrenched from his job as a senior business consultant during the Asian financial crisis of 2009. Until then, the family of eight had been comfortable but now they struggled to make ends meet.

“I didn’t have any pocket money and I was always hungry in school,” said Mr Hilmy, now 26.

Help for the family was hard to come by as they were Singapore permanent residents from Indonesia and not eligible for many forms of assistance.

But they had come to regard Singapore as home, so rather than bemoan their lot, he and his older brother, the eldest of six children, pitched in, said Mr Hilmy. While his father worked to get a business going selling spare parts to ships, Mr Hilmy worked as a camp instructor during the school holidays to earn a little pocket money.

He and his older brother also “got creative”, by sourcing for and selling clothes and shoes to friends and acquaintances, said Mr Hilmy.

This enterprising streak carried on through his national service in the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF).

He had found that many of his peers preferred wearing dry-fit shirts, and he ordered a batch of the SCDF training shirts to be made in the dry-fit material.

“I would bring along a sack of shirts to the different fire stations when I was visiting friends, and sell them to the people there,” he recalled.

“For two years, people knew me as the dry-fit shirt guy,” he said with a laugh.

He could make profits of about $9,000 in a few months through such retail stints, and most of the money went to help his family with their finances, which were still shaky, he said.

But as things began to get better, tragedy struck the family in 2015, when Mr Hilmy was in his second year at the National University of Singapore.

His older brother, then 24, was studying mathematics at a German university, sponsored by a relative.

Mr Hilmy received a call from a friend of his brother’s a day before his final examinations in school, to say that his brother had died in an accident.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” he said.

Till this day, the family does not know what happened, and the official word from the Indonesian embassy in Germany shed no light on how he had died.

Their grief-stricken parents declined to pursue the matter further with a police inquiry, as they did not want to bring any trouble to the Muslim community in Berlin, said Mr Hilmy. They also wanted their son’s body to be repatriated as soon as possible so they could conduct prayers and bury him in accordance with Muslim practice.

“The whole incident was unbelievable but I had to be strong. I became the oldest child,” he said. “I couldn’t play around any more.”

To cope, the devout Muslim sought solace in his religion, as he had done over the years.

Mr Hilmy prayed – not for the hard times to become easier, but for the strength to overcome them.

“If you pray for things to be easy, then you will be weak,” he reasoned.

There were days where he did not feel like eating or talking, but he had to grit his teeth and be “someone who was reliable” for the sake of his family, he said. His four siblings are now between the ages of 11 and 23.

Mr Hilmy said he kept busy by volunteering with his school’s Muslim society and by keeping his part-time jobs to earn money.

He made about $500 every month through giving tuition, and gave most of it to his mother to foot the household bills and his siblings’ education.

“Whatever I had, I gave to the family. I didn’t really go out so I didn’t need that much for myself,” he said.

The millennial was also determined to do more for society.

Having witnessed how difficult it was to find and keep a job, he and a group of friends set up a yearly career conference for Muslim youth in tertiary education, called the Tertiary Career Conference, to encourage them to network with business professionals.

Since it started in 2015, the yearly event now attracts up to 1,000 students and business professionals, and there are plans to expand this event to students studying in the Institutes of Technical Education and polytechnics, he said.

On the home front, things took a turn for the better in 2016, when Mr Hilmy received a sponsorship from the Building and Construction Authority to finish his studies.

Since graduating last year with a degree in civil engineering, Mr Hilmy has been serving his two-year bond as a site engineer with a local construction company – a job that offers some financial stability to his family.

He is also creating a social enterprise with a friend to help charities and social service organisations make better use of their resources through an app called Connectus.

Looking back on Mr Hilmy’s journey, his sister Ms Azzahra Gozan, 24, said the difficulties their family encountered made him a mature person.

The efforts of their two oldest brothers helped to shelter the younger ones from their family’s financial woes, she said. Mr Hilmy often made small sacrifices, such as leaving milk for his younger siblings instead of drinking it himself, she added.

“When my brother passed on, it was the turning point for him. He became a lot more mature – you can see it in the kind of events he takes part in, and the things that he thinks about,” said Ms Azzahra, who is studying psychology at the University of Technology Malaysia.

On the difficulties he has faced, Mr Hilmy said: “Sometimes I’d think ‘not again’.”

“But I would always think that this can’t be the end, there’s got to be something more (to life) out there.”

He said that life is not like a roller-coaster as the popular saying goes, but like riding a Ferris wheel.

“When you’re up there, you have to be grateful and thank God for the easy time, but when you’re down, you have to remember that things will always look up.”

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