Cooking and Baking at Simei Community Center is a new service created for UWCSEA students to be able to interact with those with mental health issues.
Session 1: As it is a new service, we spent the first session researching and planning what exactly we needed to do. We first went through their website to get an overview of the community center was about as we had no pre-existing knowledge of what the centre did. After finding out it was for those in refuge or for rehabilitation, we started planning the different activities we could possibly do with mental health patients. However, we soon learnt it was too difficult to generalise the ability of these patients without directly talking to the Simei center itself so we decided to write a list of questions to ask the center.
Session 2: We made a trip to the center solely just to get to know the leaders of the place and to understand what it really was that they wanted help with. We had a very warm welcome as they provided us with some food the patients had already made earlier in the day. We then were given an informative presentation on the Simei center and the leaders themselves. We were given clear instructions what and what not to do which was very helpful. At the end of the presentation, we were able to ask the remaining questions that weren’t already answered. Overall this session was very efficient and important as it allowed us to fully understand our roles as members of the service.
Session 3 and 4: We spent this session 3 planning for our first official session with the members of the Simei Community Center. We first began by thinking of different ice-breaker activities we could do with the patients. With the information we gathered from the previous session, we decided to just do a brief introduction of ourselves and to get to know them better. Then we decided to do 3 simple activities: Pictionary, Jenga and Uno. With these activities planned out, we hoped to get to know the members a bit more. And it did. We were able to become closer with the members and really get to know their hobbies and their cognitive and physical capabilities in order to plan our future sessions.
Session 5: We went to the center again where we set up the karaoke as in the previous session we learnt many of the members liked singing. We gathered everyone in the common room and gave them the job of selecting songs in which we all sung together. It was very fun and entertaining as many members got really into it.
Session 6: In session 6, we split into the allocated groups to plan and prepare for the upcoming sessions ahead. The co-chairs focused on making a schedule for future sessions as to what we would such as deciding which weeks we would do game activities and which weeks we would do cooking. Then they focused on the specifics of the plan such as deciding which recipe and ingredients to use. The logistics crew gathered information from the chairs and put together a shopping list suitable for the money limit. They will then go buy these ingredients and keep the receipt to claim from the Simei centre. The communications group focused on making a portfolio and organising pictures and information gathered from previous sessions
Session 7 and 8: In sessions 7 and 8 we finally began cooking in our sessions. In session 7, we made crepes and in session 8, we made waffles as the center already had waffle makers. The crepes were overall a success as not only did we manage to prepare the ingredients, set all the stations, cook and clean up in time, the members really enjoyed making the crepes as they’ve never made it before. For the waffles, we had some difficulties as the 2 out of the 3 waffle makers were faulty therefore we could only use one machine which took up a lot of time, thus leaving us with very little time to actually interact with the members.
Overall I enjoy my activity as I am able to help and give back to the community and also learn how to cook different dishes. This activity has been particularly helpful in getting to know how to organise and plan events which I think will be a useful skill in the future. I hope in the future we will be a little more organised and efficient in our planning sessions so that we can increase the amount of times we visit the center.