The France of 2015 offers a disturbing contrast to this generous image. In a few years, we absorbed 130,000 “boat people.” Back in France, people were welcoming Vietnamese refugees with open arms, mobilized by left and right-wing intellectuals, politicians and church leaders. Abandoning his private practice, he soon found himself on a flight to Singapore where he boarded the ship, Île de Lumière, and then spent a couple of months treating sick children on board and in refugee camps. Kouchner on a hospital ship he was setting up to rescue the refugees in the South China Sea. The next day, he called and volunteered to join Dr. He wrote down the Paris phone number mentioned on TV. A French doctor, Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, appealed for help. Vietnamese families, fleeing the Communists by the tens of thousands, had taken to the sea where they were falling prey to pirates and corrupt Thai border guards. Anyone present that day would surely have been able to see the pride and joy radiating from all of us.PARIS - On a summer day in 1978, my father, a 48-year-old pediatrician in a small French town, was deeply distressed by what he saw on the evening news. There has never been a prouder moment in my life than that very moment when we concluded our performance to the applause of the audience. Within our four months of training, friendships and bonds between participating seniors and juniors of ELDDS were deepened.Įven though we did not claim the highest award, I am very proud of our achievements, specifically the Accomplishment title awarded to us and, more importantly, the extraordinary improvement the entire club made throughout the process (especially in our attitude towards training as well as us being more diligent and committed in our training). The 2015 SYF experience for me was truly irreplaceable and is a memory which I will forever cherish. This experience has brought us all closer than before and we certainly look forward to the next SYF experience. This experience was very memorable and taught us very important values such as resilience, confidence as well as courage. We left the competition venue feeling proud and fulfilled because through it all, we stuck together and managed to clinch ourselves the Accomplishment award. We will work towards this dream in the next SYF in 2017. In spite of not achieving the Distinction award, we are not discouraged. It was certainly heart-warming to see everyone working together and sharing the same resolve while working towards the common goal of achieving the Distinction award. Nevertheless, with the help and unending support of our peers, our drama teachers and trainer, we managed to overcome the challenges posed to us and rose to the occasion on the day of the competition. Apart from coping with the intensive training on top of the unending mountains of homework, we had to memorise all our lines within a short period of time and deliver them to the best of our acting abilities with just the right amount of drama. The trainings were rigorous and tiring but we managed to persevere through all of them. I remember the training sessions started in December and lasted till the end of our SYF on 17 April. For SYF 2015, our script was a comedic adaptation of Macbeth by William Shakespeare.