Reflection on Hospice Visit on 7th April

Today I went to the hospice filled with anticipation, hopeful for the day’s events. I thought to myself that today would be the day that I would talk to my patient more about her family and other stuff. When we reached the hospice, we found that a group of adult volunteers were conducting activities in the big room. This came as no surprise to us as every week that we’ve been to the hospice there have been a certain group of people conducting an activity in the room. However, this time all the patients were crowded to the front, for certain reasons we do not know of. Valiant told us that it would probably be too cramped for us to interact and told us to do something different. I was not someone to be easily deterred and I felt the need to at least say a brief word to the patient. However, as I approached, some adult volunteers beat me to the patient and started interacting. The look on the patient’s face told me that she was having fun talking to the young girl of about 20 years and I did not want to interrupt their lovely conversation. Sadly, I walked out of the room. Valiant then told us reluctantly that we could help out with the hospice’s paperwork if we wanted to even though it was not what we were intended to do. We did the paperwork willingly and I personally offered to type out some letters for the receptionist. However, although I committed no mistake in typing out the letters in terms of content, the receptionist discovered a problem in the Microsoft Word’s formatting and assumed it was my mistake, and closed the whole window, asking Jue Fei to type out the letters again. Truth be told, I felt very bitter at that time and felt that our time and money had been wasted, with that day being my turn to pay the cab fare there. Subsequently, I went into the smaller room to brainstorm on other ideas with Leon and Joseph, after coming up with a few ideas, I went out, determined to say goodbye to my patient since I had not said hi. However, after searching the hospice, I had found out that she had already left with an earlier van. This just added another blow to the day for me. As I left the hospice with Joseph and Leon, I felt angry and shared my thoughts with my close friends. They calmed me down and told me although they admitted it was a wasted day, a day to the hospice was never wasted. I thought about what they had said and cooled down after a short while. We went for dinner at the nearby Novena Square and then home. And thus this marked the end of our hospice visit on the 7^th of April.

Samuel

The trip down to the hospice that day was disappointing and not extremely fruitful. Due to the abundance of volunteers that day , we were unable to interact with the patients. My group members and I were looking forward to conversing with the patients, especially since I was absent the last week. Despite that, we did manage to finalise and improve on some of our plans. After our discussion with Valiant, we were tasked with doing some paperwork for the hospice. Samuel and Jue Fei readily volunteered for the task. Thus, Joseph and I were left to brainstorm about the aesthetic part of our final product, such as coming up with catchy titles. To be honest, it was actually quite fun coming up with ideas for the title for the book, which we deemed must appeal to both the older and younger generation, as well as bearing the full meaning of this project in it. On the other hand, Samuel and Jue Fei were struggling with the paperwork that they were tasked with. Samuel thought he was doing a good job, until the receptionist closed the file that Samuel was working on and asked Jue Fei to redo it. Samuel persistently claims that he was not at fault, and that the error had already occurred before he started work. He ended up quite angry and declared that visit a waste of time.

To be honest, though we felt that the trip to the hospice was not constructive, I feel that we should sympathise with the hospice as their priorities are not towards us, but towards their patients. If they felt that the group of volunteers would have fun with the patients more than we would, then surely they would ask those volunteers to interact with them in favour of us. Also, volunteering at the hospice does not only mean interacting with the patients, but also helping the hospice, be it doing paperwork etc. Even though we did not do much that day to make progress with our project, it served as a good lesson learned.

Leon