When we last spoke to Belinda Lee in mid-2011, she was looking forward to married life. But a year and a half ago, she and her fiance broke up. She's now single and coming to terms with the breakup.
Belinda admits that the healing process is an ongoing struggle, and she feels emotionally drained. She tells us: "I've had constant nightmares since the breakup; getting through each day can be a torment."
Instead of wallowing in her pain, however, Belinda devoted herself to hosting television programmes like Renovaid, in which she helps local families in need to redo their homes; and Find Me A Singaporean, where she travels to exotic places to meet Singaporeans who have uprooted themselves for personal reasons and social causes.
The moving experiences she's had on her travels have helped her along in her own emotional journey.
Healing experience
Working on Find Me A Singaporean, the travelogue she has hosted since 2007, has given Belinda the opportunity to visit other countries and meet new people, some of whom have changed her life.
One person even helped her to start healing her broken heart, when she was filming in Mongolia during the painful period just after her breakup.
"My Singaporean host and I met a 27-year-old Mongolian woman named Turay who had been suffering from cancer for seven years.
She was a bright university graduate who was bedridden by her illness. Even so, she cheerfully thanked me for visiting her.
Perhaps she sensed that I was unhappy, because she kept telling me, 'Belinda, be strong'. I couldn't help it - I started crying. I turned to the camera and shared on-air that I was going through a difficult period, and that at times, I even felt like ending my life.
But this girl, who was valiantly fighting for her life, was telling me not to give up on mine. It made me feel so ashamed of myself," she says quietly.
A note of pain enters Belinda's voice as she recalls how she broke down when she heard that Turay passed away two to three months ago.
"I had promised her that if she recovered, I would fly her and her mother to Singapore and show them around - it was my way of giving her a reason to keep fighting for her life. I can't do that now."
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