Inspiring Seniors

I never knew old people could be so interesting. You would think they would be kind of boring, but they always have a story to tell. Victoria and I volunteered for two hours at the Senior Center. The Senior Center is a place were senior citizens can socialize and be apart of the community. By enjoying activities and playing games they can make new friends. So when Victoria and I volunteered at the Senior Center in Fremont, Kathy the person in charge of customer service, came up to us with an enthusiastic attitude explaining to us what we would be doing. She said they do not get many teenage volunteers there and she pointed out that the seniors like to see young people willing to help out. They often called us the "younger generation." The first task she wanted us to do was to update the brochure wall. The brochures involved things like staying in shape and ways to be healthy. We looked for dates that have past and took them out and replaced them with new brochures. As we were working a little old lady named Lin, walked up to us and she said, "you two are about the age of my granddaughter." She brought up how not very many teenagers volunteered much there and she was inspired. She said she would mention to her granddaughter about volunteering at the Senior Center. Moving on to our next task we were asked to clean tables and make sure there were seven chairs at each in their cafeteria. There was a group of ladies knitting and they were talking to us about how most teenagers sit on the computer all day. They liked to see us helping out. In another room there was a ceramics class and we helped them clean up and stacked chairs and tables. Next, we moved on to a room that had a Thai-Chi class. It was so cool to see senior citizens moving in such a fluent manner. It looked so graceful to watch. So we helped them put away the mats and chairs. Our last task was to alphabetize all the members identification cards. She said no on has been able to do this perfectly right so we pretty much just checked them to make sure they were in the right order. As we were leaving Kathy said we did a good job and thanked us a great number of times. I felt really good inside about helping them out with their activities and Kathy said there was more things to help with around the Senior Center. So we are probably going back there for our next reflection.