Orientation Visit Two

Okay, so it was my very first visit with T.H.E.seniors and the turnout was apparently a lot larger than usual. Most of the people who turned up were freshies, like me. We took a bus down to TOUCH Seniors Activity Centre where we met the rest of the group. After some encouragement from enthusiastic and cheery seniors, we arranged ourselves in a huge circle and began the self-introductions by stating our name, which school/faculty we belonged to and something interesting about ourselves. Somehow, most of the interesting information about ourselves had to do with our ability or inability to play the guitar and whether or not our flipflops were new. I digress.

Anyway, after we got the names of the elderly all sorted out, we split into 6 groups of 5-6 people each. My group visited Mdm Tan, an 80 year old woman and has really poor eyesight. Apparently, when she looks at us all she sees are dark black shadows. I don't know about you, but for me, imagining 6 fuzzy shadows trailing into your house is just beyond scary, much less having those shadows move around, clean your house and start talking to you.

Mdm Tan's house was really quite clean to begin with, so our tasks were pretty simple and straightforward. We helped to mop her not-very-dirty floor and clean her windows with damp rags. It didn't take very long. Those of us who didn't have any real chores to perform sat on her bed and spoke to her while helping her to poke threads of different colours through the eyelets of needles. After about half an hour or so, we were all crowded around this friendly old woman, listening to her tell us her stories in Hokkien while those fluent enough at the dialect kept the conversation going.

I'm sure many members here would already know Mdm Tan, but I'll still write a little about what she told us about herself. She has many grandchildren, and yet they only see her once a year during Chinese New Year. It was heartbreaking, really, to listen to her say that having such a large family was meaningless because she lived alone and apart from them. Even though she mentioned that her son buys her mooncakes during the Mid Autumn Festival and her daughter-in-law buys her clothes (in particular a shiny purple blouse she was wearing that day), I think anyone would have been able to tell that all she wanted was their company. I do remember seeing her face light up when the topic was eventually steered towards yummy rice dumplings, though :)

We then went on to Mdm Ho's house, which was crowded as could be with all 32 of us (including her) squeezed into her tiny studio apartment. Mdm Ho spoke mainly in Hokkien and Cantonese, with the occasional English phrases. It was really funny when she spoke in Cantonese to someone who didn't understand a word of the dialect, then attempted to do it again and again.

We then bade farewell and ended this orientation visit with a debrief session, and several group photos ;)

-Kerryn