She plans her holidays around her training

Holidays for many are planned around sightseeing. But for Debbie, holidays are planned around the conferences she wants to attend. So a trip to New Zealand included a session at the New Zealand Prison Fellowship Conference while another trip to Melbourne saw her attending the Careforce Recovery Conference.

She says she’s learning with a vengeance to make up for the lost opportunities to further the education she missed in her youth. So when she became interested in counselling after 24 years in the library line, she doggedly pursued the training she needed. Step-by-step, she acquired the qualifications from a diploma, a degree and finally a Masters – all in just six years.

And with equal tenacity, she made the switch from the comfortable library environment to a more emotionally-fraught counselling environment at the age of 49. She has made use of her skills in a wide range of areas from counselling in a church to leading the Pasir Ris Family Centre as an Executive Director. Currently, she has taken up a new role as a counsellor with the Singapore Prison Service to rehabilitate inmates.