My IMHope Journey : Part 2

Welcome back to my blog! Today, I am back at Ward 53, and we made these reindeers using toilet rolls and poms poms, for Christmas that is approaching in a few weeks' time! ✨😆

Today was mainly just making of crafts and the usual card/board games. The residents love painting and I was glad to see them enjoy the activity that was planned. As a follow-up from last week, I took initiative today to catch-up with some of them that I spoke to last week and even tried talking to some of whom I have not spoken to before. I believe that the process of befriending them is continuous and I would have to put in effort to catch-up with them on their lives every week.

Towards the end of the session, something that happened really made me reflect. What happened was that one of the residents asked a volunteer for a favour to help transfer photos to a USB drive (which I believed are photos from their outings). The volunteer agreed and the resident went around to tell everyone in the ward. This led to many other residents crowding around the volunteer asking for all sorts of favours from him. Some of the requests certainly could not be met by the volunteer as there is a limit to what we as volunteers could do to help them. Plus, there are also many strict rules we have to abide by at IMH which led to the disappointment of all those residents who asked for favours from this volunteer.

I believe the volunteer felt really bad for not being able to fulfil the small requests of them. This incident made me truly realised the constraints, and pain of being "trapped" in a place for a long time. There are many things that they could not do, simple things that we all took for granted such as using phones whenever and wherever we want. Whenever we visit, there would be one or two residents that would borrow our phones to go on to Youtube, and that is the only chance they get to do so. Perhaps the doctors and nurses or their family members can help fulfil simple requests such as food requests, but after all, it would have been much easier if they had freedom to travel around on their own outside instead of being restricted to the premises of IMH on a daily basis with the exceptions of outings. Many of us would take for granted the freedom we have in our everyday lives but those patients at IMH are confined to their wards while we are able to travel around freely. We should always be grateful for this freedom that we get to enjoy every day. I also learnt that as volunteers, we should not agree to requests made by the residents too easily as at times we might not be able to meet their expectations and might cause them to be disappointed instead. This is one very important take-away I had today.