Impacting elderly people's life

 Impacting elderly people's life,

  by María Tejedor.

As young people, we are not strangers to the lives of our loved ones and the people around us, especially those most vulnerable, such as our grandparents, older adults, who even this public health emergency such as covid-19 reminds us of. In these desires and under the motivation of accompanying the older adult more, my colleagues Adriana Lozano, Estefanny Niebles and myself, María Tejedor is how we decided to join together to make Smiley faces a reality: a project that filled for a time of light and joy the the lives of the authors, the elderly, who due to neglect, illness, mobility problems have fallen into circles of boredom, and even in the most serious cases of depression. In this way, we hope to resolve our concern and contribute to the happiness of someone else by lowering their stress levels even if it is a small grain of sand.

In our quest to create a plan we are faced with the reality that many nursing homes don't have enough activities for seniors to feel at home, so we plan to do some recreational activities on Saturday mornings or Fridays for three weeks in el hogar San Camilo, founded by the Dutch, Father Cirilo Swinne is a social project that has been taking place at the corner of the popular neighborhood La Paz. We use all our creativity to do zumba classes with boleros because for them the experience of moving a little hand in hand with their favorite songs would make them feel excited, also thinking that they integrate more with each other and talk more with those they live with. a space called “sharing experiences”, it was very nice to see how they shared stories from their youth or told us the things that made them happy. Other days we did karaoke, it was really fun to hear them laugh at each other and try to keep up, just like doing Bingo where among those 90 old men we raffled snacks. Our last activity was more independent, because they also need to regain self-control and self-determination about themselves, so we turned to sections of Paintings, Reading and table games.

After living this experience of sharing your time, your experience, your love and giving your best to see how others are happy and be happy from it, I realized that with such small things we can bring great solutions to problems as Serious as are the levels of stress and depression during adulthood, and perhaps even bring joy to the lives of people who are sick, alone, sad, abandoned or perhaps even in their last times in this world. They were very good moments shared together and with our grandparents from Hogar San Camilo, they have been mornings of dedication and dedication and I wish I had spent more time playing with them and making them laugh.

I do not consider that it was easy to carry out, we had somewhat different schedules or there were last-minute responsibilities, sometimes I wanted to spend more time and my colleagues already wanted to leave, or one of them could not attend and we had to face a group of 90 people only two of us. However, we were there to accompany each other and face our obstacles together, even if morally we communicated well and managed to get Smiley Faces ahead based on the activities we had planned.

In conclusion, let's share more time with our older adults, Leo Buscaglia shared this great teaching: “Too often we understimate the power of touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around ”, and it is one of the pillars on which this social project was supported, I encourage everyone to get involved, to donate during these times where we should be together, to protect our grandparents and to be respectful of them because it will be worth it, it will make us happy and fill our lives in unexpected ways. Perhaps in the future I can take this support in a more formal and global way, it would be an interesting path to follow.