Today I had the plea­sure of going on my first Ser­vice Club adven­ture. Jes­sica and I took two Phoenixes (Alisa and Linda), two Uni­corns (Shin­ing and Coco), and two Drag­ons (Joy and Julia) with us to an orphan­age that is about 25 min­utes away by taxi. I had heard a lit­tle about the orphan­age from Jes­sica and Miryam, who had both gone last Thurs­day, but still wasn’t quite sure what to expect. For today’s trip, Jes­sica and I wanted to bring some crayons for col­or­ing, but we didn’t have time to go to the store. (We’ll be ready next week!) Despite that, I think we had an extremely suc­cess­ful visit overall.

We met the stu­dents out­side our apart­ment (in the rain) at 3:30 so we would have time to catch taxis, get to the orphan­age, and spend about an hour there, from four to five. After we took a stom­ach churn­ing taxi ride to the build­ing with the orphan­age, we climbed into a slightly unre­li­able look­ing ele­va­tor and headed up to the sixth floor. What we dis­cov­ered there was a floor full of elderly peo­ple, so we then walked up one flight of stairs and ended up in the cor­rect loca­tion. We were greeted by one very enthu­si­as­tic boy who kept repeat­ing “hello, hello!” to us. I was sur­prised — most of the chil­dren at the orphan­age are men­tally dis­abled, so I def­i­nitely wasn’t expect­ing any­one to know even the most sim­ple Eng­lish. The boy that wel­comed us to the orphan­age was cheer­ful, and the other kids were also very excited to see us. Based on what I saw, I can’t imag­ine that the kids there get many vis­i­tors, which is sad, even if it is understandable.

Any­way, things were a lit­tle bit awk­ward when we first arrived. We didn’t have any toys for the kids, and I don’t think any of the stu­dents I was with had any expe­ri­ence with men­tally dis­abled chil­dren, so we weren’t quite sure what to do. One of my stu­dents admit­ted to me in a small voice, “I’m a lit­tle fright­ened.” How­ever, we all quickly got over our ini­tial reser­va­tions once we began to real­ize how excited the kids were to see us. Every­one started to pair off with the kids and play with them in very sim­ple ways. The boy that had first greeted us loved to walk up to peo­ple, say “hello,” and get a high five. Another girl who didn’t speak was just con­tent to sit and lis­ten to us speak.

I was the only per­son from Ser­vice Club there today that can’t speak Chi­nese, but I con­nected with one of the lit­tle girls there anyway. At first, I just sat next to her, said hi, and waved to her for a while. She gave me a big smile in return, and tried to speak with me. She would only say one sound, and I don’t think she under­stood any of the Eng­lish I said to her, but I could tell she was thrilled that I was giv­ing her so much atten­tion. Together we looked at a bul­letin board cov­ered in pic­tures of the kids from the orphan­age, admired all of the pic­tures in the hall­way lead­ing to the dif­fer­ent rooms, took turns clap­ping dif­fer­ent pat­terns to each other, and took a tour of the floor. I enjoyed the tour with her the most. She took me into almost every room on the floor. In each place, we would wave at who­ever was in the room together and she would point to dif­fer­ent things for me to look at. Most things were sim­ple, such as a pair of shoes, or even the wall, but they were inter­est­ing to her. At one point, when we were out­side, she was point­ing at the rain­drops that had col­lected on the bal­cony, and some flower petals that had fallen down. When I picked up one of the petals and let it fall back onto the bal­cony, the lit­tle girl looked at me like I had done the most amaz­ing magic trick in the world. At first, she wouldn’t touch the petal her­self, but she even­tu­ally gave it a try after I did it a few more times. When she finally picked it up, she gave me one of the biggest smiles I have ever seen. It was a really spe­cial moment.

Every­one that went to Ser­vice Club today found at least one kid to hang out with for nearly an hour. At the end of that hour, I could def­i­nitely see a dif­fer­ence in the peo­ple I had walked in the doors with at four today. At first, every­one had been a lit­tle appre­hen­sive, but at the end, all of that was gone, and I think a lot of bar­ri­ers had been bro­ken. When we were walk­ing back to the apart­ments later today and I was lis­ten­ing to what the stu­dents had to say, I was struck by what Shin­ing said, and so happy that he seemed to get so much out of the visit.

What he said, to the best of my mem­ory, was this: “Even if they can’t speak, they can still hear us. I think it’s impor­tant that we talk to them. We shouldn’t look down on them — we should pay atten­tion to them.” I couldn’t agree with him more, and I’m so glad I’ll be able to go back next week. Even if we didn’t have a lot pre­pared for the kids today, I think even the fact that we took the time to give them our undi­vided atten­tion for one hour made a huge dif­fer­ence in their lives, as well as ours.

- Kelsey