Chinese Knot making and inter-generational activities

We heard that every Tuesday afternoon the elderly in the Moral Center did Laugh Therapy, a group activity whereby elderly intermingled, exercised and laughed together. Why don’t the members of our befrienders’ club do it with them together? We approached Sandie, an official in the Moral Center and she highly appreciated this idea. So as planned, the first part of our inter-generational activities today was to laugh together with the elderly!
More than twenty of us, young and old, stood in a circle and, under the instruction of Sandie, begun imitating tiger, calling, eating, etc. The mimicking was not an end in itself, in fact all of us imitated badly; imitation was to let every laugh together, the worse every one mocked, the funnier it was. Both the young and the old laughed naturally; I realized that I was meeting the trouble half-way when I dreaded before the Laugh Therapy that no one would laugh as both the young and old would be timid. At the end of this 30-minute exercise, all the senior citizens and the members of the befrienders’ club pledge, “we are the happier people in the world!” At that instant, I really thought so. The laugh therapy worked.
Then we continued the Chinese Knot making we left off last time. This time we prepared 12 copies of notes on how to make Pan Chang Jie, a much more beautiful and complicated kind of knot compared with the last time so that elderly can refer to the notes when they forgot a certain step. Also learned the lesson from the last time, we paired the elderly and the young up: one senior citizen and a member of the befrienders’ club would make a knot together. This was to increase interaction and build rapport. Indeed, this worked. We saw the elderly and the young talked about family, school and leisure activities. However, this time the knot we chose to teach was too difficult to make – there were too many steps in it – so that it ended up the young did nearly but the elderly just sat idly by. We would choose to teach knots that are straightforward to teach the elderly the next time.
Chinese Knot making lasted for little more than an hour, after which the young and old played board game and talked in a relaxing way just like the last time for another hour. The young also brought paper and pen to jot down some words in dialect and how to pronounce them.
2007-6-12