A Day of "Volunteering"

Smile for the camera!

Two weeks ago, there was a Changsha volunteer day. In order to show our support and get in on the action, three of us interns were asked by the school to go and volunteer at a local nursing home. I jumped on the opportunity to volunteer because I thought it would be great to give back to my community here in China and thought it would be interesting to spend some time with the elderly. It was a beautiful suny afternoon when the school’s driver dropped Sam, Steffi, a few Chinese English teachers and I off at the gates of the nursing home. We were greeted by a coach full of other volunteers from the Red Cross of our district and were quickly whisked into the front and center of a group photo (Chinese people seem to need photo documentation of everything). Next, two news vans arrive and reporters and cameramen step out and walk directly up to us foreigners. We were told that they found out we would be volunteering today and came specifically to film us and interview us for the Changsha 6 o’clock news. They asked for our names and then told our coworkers that they would like to follow us around and record us doing various things for TV. I thought this was pretty funny. 

The ridiculous yellow hats they made us wear

We were then given some apples and began to waunder around the nursing home handing them out to some of the residents. Since my Chinese is pretty basic, I would hand an apple to an elderly person and say “The apple is delicious” or “a gift for you”. I can’t imagine what these old people were thinking. The camera men asked me to basically stage helping the elderly out in various ways that were so freaking ridiculous in order to get good footage. I honestly felt like Angelina Jolie in Africa ‘building’ a well: “Here Angelina, hold the shovel and pretend to dig a hole and smile for the camera!”. It was so stupid and so funny. Amber, can you hand this woman an apple, Amber can you pretend to teach this man to play pool, Amber can you wrap this scarf around this old woman’s head. The best one was Amber can you stand in front of a group of old people and say something in Chinese and do a performance. Yeah ok sure I’d love to be paraded around and fake helping people instead of actually helping them! Sounds great! The icing on the cake was being interviewed and asked why I thought it was important to volunteer and told to say that I thought old people were so cute to the camera. What the hell…only in China!

"The apple is delicous" Note the various random Chinese taking my picture

That night at 6pm I was featured on two different news channels. I didn’t get the chance to actually watch it but I’m sure it was great! Gotta love being on the news in a city of 6 million in China…not many people can say that they have. The only downfall of the whole experience was that I genuinely wanted to help. I actually wanted to do something, communicate with the elderly, give something back to them, anything. Sadly, I didn’t get to because I was made the center of attention. I would love to go back someday in my free time and legitimately volunteer and feel like I actually did something. I guess maybe by being on the news, I motivated Chinese people to volunteer because the ‘beautiful, hip foreigner is doing it’ but that would be about the only thing I can really feel like I contributed. Oh well, an interesting China experience none the less!