Emily's Second Reflection

Hello to you all!  Emily here with a new update on my time volunteering at the Best Friends Day Center.

Yesterday, I conducted my second visit to the Best Friends Day Center with music in-hand.  I had my father bring all of the piano music that he could find back home to me so that I could let the participants pick out what they wanted to hear.  Luckily for me, they really didn't care what I played.  I'm so thrilled to having been able to provide the participants and other staff with music.  One of the participants (we'll call her Anne for confidentiality reasons), was especially pleased with the gospel songs I had handy.  Anne is an absolute joy to be around.  She loves to talk about her life when she was younger, and when she knows a song, she sings right along.

Activity and crafts area.
Front table is where most socialization takes place.

I was also very fortunate to witness the participants' reactions to someone of another culture.  Right before lunch, a Muslim woman visited the center to see what volunteers did as she wanted to become a volunteer herself.  It should be noted that the majority of participants are of the Christian faith, and I'll admit, a lot of my prior experience with the older generation is that they are very suspicious of those who practice another culture.  Call me biased, but that's just my experience.  Anyway, everyone was very quiet at first, analyzing this new visitor who seemed so different from themselves.  Then, someone spoke up and asked "What's your name?"  From that point on, it was conversation and laughing for the rest of the woman's visit.  It was wonderful to see how welcoming the participants are and staff are of others!

Unfortunately, pictures are a bit hard to provide for this blog due to confidentiality reasons.  Although, we have been told that it may be reasonable to take pictures inside that do not show the faces or other identifying feature of the participants.  Hopefully next week I can provide some of these images! (See edit below.)

With love,

Emily

Edit: I got a couple of pictures during my last visit, so I'll add one to this post :)