Learning to face the reality of life…ageing

After working with kids for 11 over years, I tried something very different last Sunday. I participated in an event that involved the elderly. Volunteers from CDAC together with the Lions Befrienders organised an outing for 200 elderly most of whom have little or no family support and are receiving public assistance. The outing comprised a heritage tour on the Hippo bus followed by an evergreen concert at the Esplanade. Sounds like a piece of cake right? Not exactly. We had to attend a briefing two weeks prior to this assignment to prepare us mentally and physically. Besides giving us a run-through of how to handle the elderly, we were also informed about the common stereotypes on old folks. Old people tend to be naggy and repetitive in what they say, stubborn and even smelly etc. I got a little nervous after hearing all that because I’ve never been comfortable communicating with the elderly, much less having to interact with them for half a day.

Anyway, on the day of the outing, I got some surprises. Firstly, the old folks were not smelly at all. In fact, most of them made an effort to dress up for the occasion and some even put on make-up. One uncle even had his hair dyed red in colour, wore a choker and had a ear stud on one of his ears. So vogue lor! But honestly, despite all the dressing up, they could not conceal the fact that they are old and naturally fragile. Most of them were friendly and relatively quiet but several were overly chatty. But on the whole, I felt that the elderly were totally co-operative.

We were divided into groups of threes. In my group were two Chinese and one Indian elderly. One volunteer spoke Malay so she was paired with the Indian elderly. Another volunteer, YQ is a Chinese national studying at NUS on a scholarship. She was quick to strike up a conversation with one of the Chinese elderly so I was left to attend to the remaining elderly who seemed a little aloof to me in the beginning. I tried to be friendly, smiled a lot and made conversation but she refused to respond to me. Hmmm…I was a little puzzled…why huh? Only when I heard her conversing with the other elderly did I realise that she couldn’t speak Mandarin. I quickly switched to speaking in Hokkien and she finally responded. Phew! What a relief! Subsequently she even initiated some conversation with me at the concert. I was so glad that I could speak her dialect. Hehehe!

When the concert ended, I wanted to take some pictures for the elderly as well as YQ outside the Esplanade but unfortunately, the leader of our bus kept bugging us to walk faster and stay with the group. I found that quite annoying. We had to take a long walk to the bus bay and one of the elderly with us had very weak legs and was struggling to keep up with the rest. We kept talking to her and I took some pictures so as to distract her attention from her slow pace. Shouldn’t it be our objective to make the occasion as memorable and enjoyable as possible for the elderly? Perhaps some people felt that stressing the old folks to walk as fast as possible and keeping to the time schedule was more important >_<.

When we sent the elderly back, we had to help them bring their goodie bags to their home. On that same day someone had also donated rations to the elderly so we went with them to the community centre to help them lug the big bag of food ration home as well. I wondered why no arrangement was made to send the food parcel to their homes instead. How on earth did the donor expect the frail old folks to carry that several kilograms of food by themselves back home? It is indeed kind to make the donation but the effort would have been more meaningful if the donor had hand-delivered the food to the recipients, wouldn’t it? Anyway, we did the lugging, sent the old folks to their door steps, got a glimpse of their HDB ‘studio-apartment’ living condition, then we were done for the day.

The entire event took only half a day. I wouldn’t say I interacted very much with the elderly. I did learn a few things about communicating with them and understood them a little better but more importantly, it enabled me to visualise what life would be like if I were to remain single and have no family support when I reach their age. Living alone does not necessarily mean that life has to be lonely. With the support from the community and many of these outreach programmes, life can still be wonderful during those sunset years.