Journal Update (-inez-)

Seniors’ fair
Ha. I’m here to rant.
Like chinnie, I helped out with the balloon sculptures. I helped out on the evening of the 2nd day and the morning of the 3rd day. That was the closest I ever got to practically starting an argument with a stranger. This woman from a particular organization that was involved in the fair came up and asked for 2 balloons, then she changed her mind. 4 balloons. Okay.. 4 balloons + special request (all had to be the two parrots with the heart design which took horribly long to make)?!? When there was an extremely huge crowd waiting around wanting balloons. I told her 4 balloons were too many. I said 4 balloons were unreasonable. She said they were for her friends. Right. The couple making the balloons told me it was alright, they would make the balloons (said they had no choice, they didn’t want to antagonize her). A kid and his mum asked for a balloon. I took down their order. The previous woman came back with a friend, who demanded one balloon. 4 balloons later, I gave the next balloon to the kid. The woman said, “But my friend came first!” Right. I told her no and anyway the poor kid had been waiting for ages for her 4 balloons to be done. I could have chewed her up on the spot. Seriously. And it’s rare for me to get that angry. . It’s amazing how self-centred people can be. On the 3rd day, I came back, determined to not let that happen again. I made the people queue and didn’t let them take more than 2 balloons. Ha!

I learnt quite a bit through speaking to the elderly over the three days at the fair. There was this lady, around 60+ whom I spoke to while she was waiting for her free haircut. She told me about her plans for the future- how she planned to send herself to an old folks’ home as she didn’t want to be lonely, if she had enough money (and that she had been checking out the prices of accommodation at old folks’ homes at the fair but only found one home). She told me that now that her kids were grown up, they wanted to take care of their own kids and did not spend much time with her even though she invested a lot of time and money on them when they were younger. I was surprised that she actually wanted to admit herself to a home and most of all horrified at how she mentioned her children’s behaviour in such a matter-of-fact way, no bitterness, no disappointment. What happened to intergenerational bonding and all the talk about how the elderly can contribute to a healthy family life? It made me wonder whether this was that common here and that such a thing was to be expected of their grown-up children.

Many of the elderly told me that they came to the fair because they had nothing better to do and coming to the fair was much better than sitting at home doing nothing. Another told me that he could neither hear well nor see well, that he could not do much apart from sitting down to try to enjoy the performances. Perhaps the elderly are not integrated well enough in society and feel they do not have a part to play in society, with feelings of uselessness and low self-esteem stemming from that.

Whew. That was long. I feel much better now.

Spring cleaning
Spring cleaning left me feeling really impressed. The elderly living in the flats that I helped to clean up were truly multilingual- English, Chinese, Malay and many other dialects! Really cool! The houses were cleaner than I expected, the elderly had clearly made an effort to clean up their houses and what we had to clean were just places that were inaccessible to them, like windows and beneath the bed. Also, the elderly living in the flats were very friendly and open, despite us strangers trooping into their houses and insisting that we wanted to help to clean up their reasonably clean houses.

Heritage trail
(next week!)