Chinese knot making and intergenerational activities

As planned, we arrived at the Moral Center at ten o’clock. As the Moral Center was informed of our Chinese Knot Making lessons in advance and had thus notified the elderly who are interested, some senior citizens were already waiting there.
Xiaoyi taught the elderly Shi Zi Jie. The elderly mastered the skill and at the end of the lesson each of them can produce at least three such knots. However, as the lesson is heavily content-based, there lacked interaction and bonding between the young and the old, another important aspect we wanted to achieve in our project. Beside, for the convenience of the elderly, we will print out the main steps in making the knot so that they can refer to it when they forgot how to make the knot.
The inter-generational activities in the afternoon turned out to be a successful one. More than ten senior citizens played games with the members of the befrienders’ club for a whole afternoon until five o’clock when the Moral Center closed.
We played Pingzi. It was a game similar to Majiang, except that parts of Chinese characters replaced the normal “Dong Feng”, “Ba Gu”,etc. This improved the elderly’s Chinese, at the same time, we got an excellent chance to learn elderly’s dialect. Each time a new character was formed, we would request the elderly to pronounce it in their dialect and we would roughly take it down on our note book. We hope little by little, we can more or less understand what the elderly were talking in dialect.
We also played Majiang with the elderly for recreation. Nummy, a math-related game in which the one who can put out all his card first can win, was also rather interesting. The elderly were rather good at this: they figured out for many time how to put out a card when we thought it was impossible. This showed that the elderly were still large sharp in their mind and affirmed our belief that they could still contribute to the society in one way or another (like sell Chinese Knot for charity).
I also solved a jigsaw puzzle together with an elderly. We were so happy that we made more than fifty pieced together in a few minutes.
By and large, the activities today were fruitful and we would keep it on and visit the Moral Center more often during the holiday.

2007-6-7