At first, I misjudged the timing and arrived earlier at the Kallang MRT station. I was alone and feel pretty nervous, did I alight the wrong station? Fortunately, the peoples coming for the THE Seniors became more and more, it is certainly out of my expectations that so many peoples came for this meaningful activity.
I originally signed up for Hokkien group as I seek to brush up my hokkien speaking as I am a hokkien myself. However, I switch to Cantonese group as they are low in number and I happened to know some Cantonese. ( I lived near KL, Malaysia before coming here)
We met two old madams which I couldn't remember their names (bad memories, must be spoiled by those carzy modules). As we goes on helping them to clean houses and interacts with them, I've found out that languages are not important, they sometimes speak a mixture of dialects so fast that I couldn't catch up. In this case, I feel like I am the old man with slow reflex.
The madams were nice people, one of them chat with us for almost an hour despite feeling depressed (I guess we helped relieve her bad mood somehow), and the other one, thought very particular in certain things, insisted that we accept her drinks after we cleaned her home.
Helping the elderlies were actually quite helpful in relieving stress, when I was helping them doing house chores, chatting or even just listening to them, I felt calm, relaxed, accompanied, just like the feel when you are with your family and friends, forgetting all the troubles at the moment where somewhere in the heart, an empty space was occupied. I guess they felt that too, thats why they kept chatting with us, somehow, in this fast paced world, everyone is lonely and feels empty, where we help each other by filling in the empty spaces.
There's a lot of lessons to learn fro the elderlies, one of the madam actually told us her past career at a hotel, she worked for 20 years, serving salads and other appetizers to westerners despite not knowing anything about English. She told us how she learned to memorize the English words by using Chinese pronunciations. For me, this is quite amazing as such perseverance does not exist in me.
The debriefing sessions are quite hard for me as I couldn't, at that moment summarize my feelings. But now, I just said this out clearly and certainly I am looking forward to meet the seniors again this Saturday as such experience and fulfillment cannot be found elsewhere. I will end this with a pun on MasterCard advertisement:
Broom: 5$
Public transport fares: 4$
A lunch at Kallang: 3.50$
A day with old folks: priceless
For everything else, there is the coming Saturdays.
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