Service Day, by Aimee

The Service Day for middle school was held on a half day in the morning which also happened to be the day that JSB happened (see Hannah's blog).  For the Service Day we were going to an elderly folk's home called The Silver Jubilee Home for the Aged.  A few days before, we planned all we were going to do with them.  I was in a group that made the bookmarks for all the old folks.  The home was on the other side of the island of Penang and was a 45 minute drive from Dalat.  We brought with us some cookies and juice boxes for the old folks.  When we got there we split into three big groups so that we could go separately to different wards and talk to them.  We had planned some games and other stuff but it seemed like all they wanted was company and conversation.  Our big group split into small groups of four so that we could talk more one-on-one with some of the elders.  We didn't have enough time to talk to all of them so we mostly spoke to the ones who spoke English.  We asked them lots of questions.  Than we moved on to the room where all the elderly people did light exercise.  One of the ladies there spoke very good English so we talked with her for a long time.  Than we moved on to the male ward.  We spoke to this man who had been in the army.  He was quite old and spoke pretty good English.  We then moved on to the dining hall where we talked to one lady and played cards.  The game we played with her was called War.  It is a game where you each lay down a card at the same time and whoever gets the highest card gets all the cards that were laid down.  Whoever has the most cards in the end wins.  It is quite a simple game and even though this old woman had not played it before she still won.  The time went very fast and soon it was 15 minutes until we had to go.   The last thing we did was sing a song to them.  It is called Count On Me by Bruno Mars.  We then gave them the cookies and juice boxes and left.  Overall, this was probably my favorite Service Day that we have done so far because I got great advice from the seniors. It was very interesting to hear from these elderly people and what they had to say.

This is the song we sang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?=yJYXItns2ik

Here is a video with pictures from our experience: Dalat Middle School Service Day, 2015 - Silver Jubilee Home  I am in a red shirt.

This is a picture of the Silver Jubilee Home.