Art & Craft With Children At KK Hospital

The corporate volunteering event organizer remembered me.  At KK Hospital, while we were waiting for our lift, she turned to me and said, “We haven’t seen you this year!”

It is true.  It was one year ago when I joined the weeding program at Pulau Ubin.  That was hard work.  Since then, I have been looking for something less laborious and less shocking.  In fact, another option is to spend an afternoon at a mental hospital, which I still haven’t got the courage to sign up yet.  Now that I appear to bond well with my two to six years old nieces and nephew, I thought, perhaps I could contribute my time doing art and craft with children in a hospital.

Except, I have totally forgotten that these children are residing in a hospital for a reason, and they are quite big.  I can’t possibly play hide and seek with them screaming at the top of our lungs and let them beat me up while pretending to be a big bad monster, can I?

Uh oh.  All of a sudden, I realized that I had zero experience for this particular event that I have happily signed up for.

Before meeting the children from different wards, 12 of us were briefed inside a room specially prepared for the volunteers.  The dos and don’t’s.  And we have a crash course on how to play the games brought in by our corporate event organizer.  Since I am a balloon phobic, I could not join the balloon making team.  Since I am not that good at playing children’s games, I could not man the common playground area either.  Instead, I was paired up with a female volunteer to visit the children at their beds.  Best practice says that children bond better with women.  I was happy to tug along and let my volunteering partner did the introduction.

Drawing is something I love to do.  So I was delighted for this arrangement.  The tool we have is simple, yet utterly fun.  First, we picked a template with the children.  It could be a bee, a flower, or anything that came with the deck.  Then we put a clear sheet of plastic on top of the template and traced the object with some thick ink.  As and when the ink dries up – hours or days – it can be peel off from the plastic sheet.  I told the 12 years old boy that he could stick it onto his daddy’s Apple laptop and we giggled.  OK, I am jumping ahead of my story.

The girl was 19 years old.  We chatted while we drew.  She said she could not draw.  But nothing is impossible after a few words of encouragement.  We talked about K-pop and J-pop.  We talked about seeing the world.  She liked photography and that was quite frankly my favorite topic.

At the other end of the ward, a 12 years old boy saw the three of us having fun.  He also wanted to join.  With my new found confidence, I headed over to him, alone.

Again, he told me that he could not draw.  And he seemed slightly frustrated by the mistakes he made.  I said, this is art, you don’t have to follow the template!  I showed him what I have got, which was totally abstract and random.  All of a sudden, he smiled.  We removed the template underneath so that he could draw freely.  Halfway he stopped and asked me, “What is this that I am drawing?”  Honestly I have no idea.  But it truly looked beautiful.  So I started rotating his drawing and showing him how we could interpret an art from different perspectives.  I then showed him that we did not have to see the picture from above.  Instead, we could turn flip it over and observe its mirror image.  The boy seemed enlightened and he asked if it was OK to add a sun (that later turned into a hand) onto his drawing.  I smiled and said, “Sure you can!”

He said, “I really love drawing!”

I replied, “That is great!  Now keep drawing!”

“I want to be an artist when I grew up.”

“Me too!”

“What do you do?”

“I love to paint and I love creating music.”  (OK, I did not tell him that I write emails and minutes for a living.  That would have been rather uninspiring, I reckon.)

We talked about many things.  He asked if I have a Facebook account and I said no (as briefed by the hospital staff earlier on).  He asked if my band has a video clip on YouTube and I said no (which is true).  He asked how long I would stay with him and I said till I am hungry.  So we have a few hours, he said and I nodded.  I did not stay long because the medication seemed to have zapped his energy away.  At least he has completed his drawing with me by his side.  And I left my drawing titled “Lisa” for the little boy as a souvenir.

What a fulfilling day today in getting to see another aspect of life.