On the 26th of February, which was a Friday and a public holiday, LEO Club of INTI-UC organized a trip to visit a total of 7 orphanages and old folks home. And we were separated int two groups, each visiting 3.5 homes :)
We spent the whole week preparing the activities that we are going to do there - singing and dancing :O
The sessions were led by Le Lee, the awesome organizer for this event!
Le Lee coaching the participants to sing LOL!
"Wait, I dunno how to read Chinese =.=""
Dancing practice.
On the day itself, I woke up early at 5am just to get to campus by 6:30am =_=". We departed at 7am in two buses, my bus was headed to Klang area while the other went to Kuala Lumpur.
It took one and a half hour to reach the place, the first house was an old folks home.
The Red Salvation Army!
So we went into the house, it was... small? It was a house with a small living room lined with beds, wow... Imagine having not enough space and the old peoples had to sleep in the living room?!
I guess that's the harsh reality of the world, I feel sorry for them having to stay in a house like this. :(
So we sang some New Year songs, danced a bit there. The old folks there were like... uh... annoyed? Well, I'm not sure la, some of them were enthusiastic, but most of them looked emo, and didn't respond well to us : /
Then we prepared some foods to serve them, mandarin oranges, spongecakes, soyabean drinks. And went on to talk to them, and it was quite awkward for me haha, since most of them speak Hokkien and I didn't understood a word =.= ... Not to mention I suck at spontaneous conversation, which made the situation a lot more difficult lol.
And then we had a photo session. :)
Time flew so fast, we had to leave about an hour and a half later, to a nearby orphanage. It's heartbreaking to see some of the old folks, especially the grannies, asking us if we can stay for a while more, or asking if we are going to visit them again soon.
I'm not portrayed as an emotional guy but this really got me feeling sad for the whole day :(
Anyway, we went to the next home, which was around 15 minutes drive away. When we reached there there was already another group of people visiting the kids and conducting some activities.
And their activities seemed much more interesting than ours lol. How sad, didn't get the chance to play with the kids, aww... And all of them seemed so hyper!
So what to do, since there's not point interrupting their activity, we just dropped our gifts and left lor....
We went on to Bukit Tinggi Jusco to have our lunch.
It was, quite huge. But the foods are blardy expensive =_=". I'll skip the details about the lunch lol.
Then at 2pm, we reached the 3rd home - Grace Home.
This was an all ladies club, there were only Chinese and Indian grannies in there.
Then of course, we did our stuffs, we sang and danced a bit. A few of the aunties got too excited and joined us in the dance too lol. I never knew some old people can be this cool :D
Then we served them food again, got sponsor from a bakery ma :P. And I kinda tried to hide inside the kitchen to wash the dishes, mainly because I can't find a seat and I didn't know what to talk about with the aunties, takut raise sensitive topics lar... :(
Overall this home was more well-maintained, and it's non-profit some more! Wow, really admire the owner, philanthropy at it's best.
So after the photo session we left the home for our last destination, which was located in Seremban :O
It took more than 2 hours to get there, it rained and the traffic was awful.
But anyway, we managed to reach there in time. This last home -Lifecare Nursing Home, is a business organization, so the old folks were actually paying to stay there.
Well, my first impression was, it was pretty neat. The place was quiet, and there were three houses for the old folks.
We were split into several groups to visit the different houses because we were short of time. The first house I went into, it was... Hmm... Indescribable.
Almost all the people there were suffering Alzheimer's disease, or dementia some of you would call it. They were basically, mentally paralyzed. They just sat there, didn't know what was happening, and some were even muttering random random sentences. It was quite sad for them really... :(
So it was kinda demoralizing for us, to had the songs and dances prepared and yet the couldn't understand what we were doing...
Anyway, we went on to visit the third house, there at least, the people there were more happy to see us come. And the atmosphere was awesome, almost touching really, the other groups rendezvous with us in this last house and the place was literally packed like a sardine can.
And I'm glad the people there really appreciated our visit, they were happy to see us there :)
The CNY Marathon Visitation ended at 6:30pm and it was a success in overall, though I still felt that it was a waste that there was a glitch with the orphanage visit. Ah well...
This event had left me... Let's see... Traumatized? This was the first time I visited the old folk homes and I was blaming myself for not being spontaneous enough to talk to them :( ... But other than that, I was kinda shocked, to realize that this is the world that the peoples have been living in.
It's really harsh reality...
And nobody, it seems, was doing something about it. The government, what were they doing? These non-profit homes were squeezing every single cents out of their savings and yet we have the government spending millions and millions of Ringgit on nonsensical things.
Remember our "own" F1 Team Lotus? Promoting Malaysia my foot, white elephant much?
Where is the justice? Where is the love?
That's all for today, till next time, cheers~
RSS Feed (xml)
No comments:
Post a Comment