100 mother-daughter pairs featured in book tribute to healthcare workers
Dr Khemani Neeta Parshotam did not grow up wanting to be a doctor. It was her Secondary 2 form teacher who prompted her to pursue a triple-science course and study medicine eventually.
The 56-year-old took the advice and has been a general practitioner at Chai Chee Clinic & Surgery since 1998.
Her daughter, Ms Pooja Aarti Rai, on the other hand, was motivated to take up a profession in healthcare much earlier in life.
As a child, she would visit her mother’s clinic and help with small tasks such as packing medicines and writing labels. When she was older, she worked as a clinic assistant and observed the relationships between her mother and her patients.
Ms Rai, 21, is now a third-year medical student at Nanyang Technological University’s Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine and wants to follow in her mother’s footsteps to become a general practitioner.
The duo’s journeys in healthcare are among the portraits and stories of 100 mother-daughter pairs featured in Women Inspiring Women – The Home Edition.
The photo book, by Dr Chua Yang, an obstetrician and gynaecologist at Mount Alvernia Hospital was launched by Minister for Foreign Affairs Vivian Balakrishnan at the National Gallery Singapore on May 2. It was followed by an exhibition, which was on till last Thursday, of some of the photos from the book.
In March 2022, ahead of Mother’s Day, Dr Chua, an avid street photographer, decided to do something to honour her late mother, artist Lee Boon Ngan.
“I wanted to highlight the very natural strong bonds and love that exist between mothers and daughters,” says the 54-year-old, who is single.
Getting 100 pairs of mother-daughter in healthcare was a long and arduous journey that took almost a year, she says.
She started by photographing and interviewing her friends and colleagues who also have daughters in the medical line, followed by referrals.
“I wanted to celebrate the many wonderful women who have dedicated their lives to helping people in their most vulnerable moments, in pain or sickness, and were inspirations to their daughters who followed them into healthcare,” says Dr Chua.
The biggest challenge she faced was everybody’s busy schedules.
“The appointments were quite tricky to fix with everyone’s work schedules, on-call rosters, weddings, childbirths, Covid-19 infections and exposures and, eventually, travel,” says Dr Chua.
She completed the last shoot in January and took about two months to write up their stories.
The book is not for sale. To get a copy, make a $100 donation to the Singapore Medical Association Charity Fund, which provides financial assistance to needy medical students.
As at Monday, $95,000 has been raised through book donations for the Singapore Medical Association Charity Fund.
To donate and/or get a copy of the book, go to str.sg/ioRv
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