Home for 50 Elderly People in Argentina

The activity was based in San José Residence, which is kind of an eldery care home in Ciudadela, near Buenos Aires city. Every day (and every night) all the workers take care of the many residents there, they assist the residents with their hygienic habits, give the medication to them, prepare food, make activities.. Activities like today: Solidary Children

Plenty of children from the school San Miguel went to San José to spend the morning with the residents. The 16 year-old children arrived in the morning and they were interacting with the elderly. In the beginning was a bit of first contact between them, introducing themselves, swaping information like age, nationality, hobbies. At that point some of the children felt a bit shy, not very talkative, but after a few minutes they started to speak more and their corporal language showed that they were more comfortable.

I think it was an interesting interaction, because none of them seem to be in contact with people of the other age, apart from the relatives, and children can learn a lot from elderly and be more empathetic with people at that stage of the life, and for the elderly it is good to be with fresh people, to see new faces, to listen different voices and new stories. Not everything was easy, there were some language barriers, for example: one of the elderly cannot hear so they had to communicate through writing.

At the end of the morning we played bingo all together, which was really funny. It helped to the communication as well, there were plenty of prizes for the winners. To sum up, today was a really interesting and successful day, both sides got positive experiences and they should repeat this quite often.