Last Saturday, a small group of us had a fantastic time volunteering at an old people’s home in South London called Woodlands House.  It was a lovely home with about 60 residents, most of whom had Alzheimer’s or Dementia.  We were planning to spend the morning doing some activities with the residents including a ‘pub quiz’, a game of ‘family fortunes’ and a sing-a-long of some songs from the good old days ;-)  We had also taken along some treats for a small tea party. 

When we first got there, a lot of the residents seemed to be sleepy or weren’t very engaged with what was happening around them.  We later learned that that drowsiness is one of the effects of Alzheimer’s medication.  We were a little nervous about whether we would be able to get them involved in the activities we had planned, especially because a lot of them were partially deaf too.  None of us had done anything like this before and we had lost our fearless organizer, Trishna, who had the most experience with these sorts of events.  We decided to just dive in and see how the morning unfolded.

We started with ‘Family Fortunes’ (Family Feud in the US).  The initial plan was to get Ram to yell the questions out at the top of his voice, Jenny and Aditi to keep score and Priya to use the buzzer.  We quickly realised that it would take all of us to just get the questions heard and help the old folks get the answers.    So, we put the pens and the buzzers down and started moving around the room trying to make sure as many residents as possible were participating.  
 
We had prepared questions that we thought would be easy enough but we realised that most of these were still too difficult so we  just started making questions up.  “Name some planets?”, “Name some colours from the rainbow?” Anything we could think of.  We had a couple of lovely old ladies who were able to answer a quite a few of the questions and were actually quite entertaining.  One of the old ladies, Bette, had a loud voice and a contagious laugh and a great personality.  She had joined us with her friend from the floor above and their enthusiasm definitely helped everyone else get more involved.  
 
One of the questions was “Name some people who wear big boots to work?”.  People were calling out a couple of the expected responses – “Policemen”, “Fireman” etc... when Bette called out “Lucy” (who is one of the care givers who works there).  This made the care-workers and us laugh.  When we asked “Who is the head of the Tory party?” she asked “Is it David Cameron?” “Yes – that’s right!” “Isn’t he the guy that doesn’t want us to join Europe?” “Yes – I think so.” “Bloody idiot he is!” she retorted, which was so unexpected that it also gave us all another laugh.
 
All the residents in the room seemed very keen to join in, but for a lot of them it was very difficult to remember even very simple things.  However, they still seemed to be really enjoying the fact that we were there and that there was a great buzz in the room –  whenever anyone got a question right, we made a big fuss.   Even the care workers, who were in a room on the side doing admin kept wanting to get involved and started yelling out responses to the questions! About half of they way through, the residents enjoyed a cup of tea and some of the treats we had brought along, but they seemed to be more interested in getting on with the quiz!
 
After about an hour or so we running low on questions to make up and decided to wind down the quiz.  We gave out some prizes at the end which were a great hit with the old folks!  We then moved into the sing-a-long.  We started with a CD that we had prepared with some Christmas songs and a few old classics but we learned that they had a CD that they listened to more frequently and knew the songs well, so we played that CD instead.  We danced around the room and the care workers joined in while the residents sang along.  It was interesting to see that some of the residents that had not really been able to participate actively in the quiz or Family Fortunes knew all the words to the songs and were able to sing along.  The ones that weren’t singing were still clapping and smiling. 
 
The sing-a-long was a really nice way to end our morning together with the group.  Everyone was in great spirits and the residents were beaming away as we danced and sang.  The residents and the care staff were really happy and grateful that we came along to spend some time at the nursing home.  They said that nursing homes don’t generally attract a lot of volunteers. 

We all felt incredibly uplifted and happy to have been able to engage the residents and bring some smiles to their day.