Community Involvement Project - A Trip to River Safari
Post by Lim Shi Ying and Joshua Ian Lim
External Organization: St Luke’s Eldercare
Objectives:
To promote intergenerational bonding through the activity
To bring peace and joy to the beneficiary (St Luke’s Eldercare) through meaningful and fun interaction between the volunteers and the elderly
This CIP is an initiative by one of our GATE Community members, Ong Zhen Hui, and her team members. Zhen Hui suggested that we participate in this CIP as a GATE Community as she needed volunteers and it would also be fun to participate in this activity with our classmates and friends from GATE. It was indeed more interesting joining this CIP together as a GATE Community because we were all familiar with each other and hence we mixed around to pair up to take care of the elderly.
For this CIP, we had to bring the elderly around River Safari and interact with them as they walked through the entire route. It was definitely and interesting experience for both the elderly and the volunteers because for many of us, it was also our first time visiting River Safari. I guess this CIP taught us the importance of patience because quite a few of the elderly had problems walking so they walked really slowly. Some of them also got tired easily and sat down to rest every time they saw a bench available for them to sit. As volunteers, we had to follow the pace of the elderly and constantly encourage them to continue walking through the entire route. It wasn’t easy because we were also tired too but yet we had to get them to move on since we had a stipulated time to finish the route by.
I guess on the whole this CIP was really quite engaging because we got to visit a tourist attraction where most of us hadn’t been before, we got to interact with the elderly (which can help us to improve our befriending skills for the TTSH SL project) and most importantly, we got to bond better as a GATE Community J
