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From January to March this year, 32 students and a team of CCC, RP facilitators embarked on Project Vintage, CCC’s first community project for the year, with the shared objective of celebrating and affirming the lives of the elderly at Sunlove Marsiling. Their 3 month effort culminated in a photo story exhibition at SUNLOVE Marsiling (12 – 31 March 2008), at South Agora, Republic Polytechnic (1 – 12 May 2008), and at Fort Canning Centre (13 – 15 June 2008) for Arts Unlimited, an Arts initiative by N-Parks.
Professor Tim Stanton, from Stanford University, applauded the efforts of
Project Vintage as a pioneer in service learning, for the photo exhibition had
captured the processes of service learning itself and commended the students
for not only raising the awareness of the youths in the issues of the elderly,
but also that of the adults. Project Vintage successfully bridged the chasm between the young and the elderly, and forged a
bond between the two groups. The experience drew the students out from their perspective that the older generation is a generation beyond them. An oral history component of the project
provided a rich opportunity for the students to engage in a tremendously
rewarding interaction with the elderly - they learnt about the hopes, feelings,
aspirations, disappointments, and the personal experiences of the elderly -
insights which made them understand and appreciate the place of the elderly in
our society.
Project Vintage is a spin-off of
CCC’s Discussion Café for January – Senior Talkshop by Tsao Foundation, which
sought to raise the awareness of the growing silver population in our society
amongst the youths in RP. For the students to fully appreciate the essence of
the Discussion Café session, there was no better way than for them to be taken
on an experiential journey into the world of and with the elderly, as embodied
in Project Vintage. To equip the students with the relevant requisite skills for
the project, they attended a series of training workshops conducted by
organizations such as Tsao Foundation, Asian Story Telling Network, and staff of
CCC, OSG and STA. The training by Tsao Foundation transported them into the
world of the elderly through simulation activities. It allowed them to be more
sensitive to the needs and feelings of the elderly, and this was instrumental in
the students’ interview sessions with the elderly. The Oral History workshops
conducted by staff of CCC underscored the value of oral history as a means to
learn about the perspectives of people - ordinary ones who fall through the
cracks of written records, but whose lives offer as many lessons as those
documented in historical records. Whilst the Oral History workshops equipped
them with the relevant skills to learn more about the lives of the elderly, the
story shaping sessions by Asian Story Telling Network taught them ways to
structure and frame the data collected into delectable stories of these elderly.
The training workshops were complementary in nature, and they were crucial in
providing the students with the necessary skills and knowledge required for them
to effectively interact with elderly, and pursue the project.
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Students of Project Vintage together
with the staff of CCC, worked for 10 weeks to ensure the success of the project.
The journey was not without its set of difficulties – students struggled with
differences in spoken languages, with responses from their zealous interviewees
that did not address the questions posed, with the arduous and painstaking
process of transcription, with the challenging process of shaping the data into
accessible short stories for the photo exhibition, and most of all, with the
demands on their time and energy. Despite all these, they remained as one
unified team, bound by one unified cause – and surmounted the problems together.
The resilience and character of the elderly rubbed off on the students of
Project Vintage, and after 10 weeks of dedicated hard work, the fruit of their
labour – the photo journal exhibition is sweet and delectable. It is truly a
celebration, not only of the journeys travelled by the elderly at SUNLOVE
MARSILING, but also of the invaluable learning experience of the students.
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Project Vintage embodies a rewarding experience for all the participants involved – it
is a manifestation of how we are never divorced from any group of persons in
society, if only we would make the effort to bridge the chasm and support them
with what we could do. Project Vintage has allowed the participants to be part
of a historical process as they interacted with one another - history is after
all, all about the human experience, the human interactions. It has also
allowed them to be part of a therapeutic process – by giving the elderly
interviewees the opportunity to relate their own life stories in their own words
to a group of attentive listeners, the first time for all of them; this
constituted a form of therapy to them. Project Vintage has allowed the
participants to be part of a socially virtuous process – as the students
recorded and documented the stories of the elderly, they are affirming and
celebrating the lives of these elderly people; which serves as an apt
encouragement to them that their lives have not been led in vain. Finally,
Project Vintage has enabled the students and elderly to feel
a personal connection to the past and present respectively, and to the life of
their community. The experience allowed the students to understand the past in a
first-person way, and to gain a palpable sense of the joy, pain, sorrow, fear
and hope that the elderly experienced as history unfolded. In the building of
such connections between the students and the older people, it has served to
forge the bond between the young and the aged, and laid the foundation for the
creation of a stronger community.
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