Old People's House

The second service during the conference I went to Old People's House in Banglamung along with a small number of delegates. This was an orphanage for those who had been left or disregarded by their family so they would come here and live their life.

This service project was separated into 3 main parts, cleaning the beach, planting crops, and getting rid of the climbing plants on both sides of footpath on the way down to the beach. My first duty was to go down to the beach to clean up as much as possible, but it was almost impossible to completely wipe out everything that was there because the waves keep hitting the coast, and either drawing some trash back or giving me trash but at least we did put some effort to make the beach look a little bit cleaner after my duty even though we knew it would have been the same the next day anyway. My second ship was to plant some crops that would be sent to this Old People's House and would later be used for food, the process was only to put a soil in a pot, plow the soil, water the soil and plant some seed. And the last past was to clean the footpaths along the side to the beach, which was the hardest physical job in the day because shovels were needed to scrape off everything on the surface.

Later that day in the afternoon, we went and did what they regularly did in the Old People's House, playing Bingo. I was to team up with one of the senior resident and even though it was not clear but I could see them enjoying being companied by foreigner friends and at the end of the day, they did ask us to come again in if possible.

Our goal, just like at the Fountain of Life Children's Centre, was to entertain them and to be there for them if they needed anything and we accomplished that goal and looking back at how we achieved it, it was rather impressive because we did face probably only one difficulty, the language barrier. There were some residents who knew how to speak a decent english but most of the residents could not and this was the main problem.

But after all, that day was a big success both for us, and for all the residents at the Old People's House as well. We did give out our effort to help them and appreciation was received and I felt grateful for what I had done during that day and had been appreciated back and there was one thing I learnt that, no matter how uncanny it might have sounded for foreigners to go help them without knowing the existence of this place before, the kindness was still sincerely appreciated and for that I would like start devote myself to help those who are not as fortunate as I am to be living their life happily.