Tag: #LO7

Similar as before, we had our partners coming on a regular basis. I liked how my partner always came while some other people who used to come stopped coming. I think this was a indicator that I was doing quite well. To be honest, my partner still did not want to follow some moves. To help her stretch her body and relax her body and minds, I had to tell her to participate more and be more focused on the program. But at the same time, I knew that it was not only that she did not want to do it, but I could see that her being not as flexible than others sometimes made her give up doing postures. It was rather something more like fear. I faced this internal conflict for which I had to use my moral principle wisely to solve.

I decided to make her participate more by doing what she does. When she kept staring at the wall, I did the same, waiting for her to be back to the program. I lay down on the floor when she did so. I think this trial was effective as I did not offend or hurt her by forcing her to participate but rather I waited for her to back to the yoga mode. Through this experience, I realized that I am good at reading others mind and considering the impact of my actions on them before taking actions. I think it is skill that is very important. I will continue to try my best to make my partner participate more.

The circumstances around us over the past few months have been very different from what we would normally expect our school life to look like. Our service being a local service, we couldn’t have interaction with our service partners. As face-to-face interaction is important aspect of our service, it was so sad that we could not actually do what we are usually supposed to do in our service. During quarantine life, I have been quite busy working on many internal assessments and I barely exercised to be honest. I sometimes did some stretching and that was all. After few months of life like this, I realised the importance of moving my body and staying active. Especially Yoga or pilates are important as they help our body relax. As a person who realised the importance of staying active myself, I hoped we could call our partners and have yoga sessions to help our partners stay active too, but it was hard to do so. I think changing the way things work is just really hard for both students and teachers as it is our first time experiencing online learning and lockdown. Even though we could not meet our partners and do yoga with them, I think the discussions we had online about our sessions so far on how we could support and keep in touch with our partners were very meaningful and important. If some of us continue to be part of this service and we still cannot invite our partners to school, our backup plans and ideas we discussed will be very helpful in designing our service program next year. Looking back, what I really liked about my service is the warm atmosphere that my peers, Ms Veron, and our service partners create. Some of our partners could not speak English. As a person who learned English as my second language in high school, I have experienced difficulty in communicating with people with enough clarity and  I initially thought that the language barrier might hinder the effective communication. There were some hardships when I could not clearly understand what my partner was saying, but through many interactive sessions I could understand her words by her body language and I realised that with body languages and facial expressions, we can still communicate and interact well. To conclude, I would like to talk about how my opinion on or view of people with down syndrome has changed.  I think it is now time for any people in the world to see the real superb personalities and chartacters of people with down syndrome and try to include them more into our society. To be honest, I have heard about down syndrome but I had no experience of having interacted with people with down syndrome. When we visited MINDS center at the beginning of the year, I was unsure how to approach/introduce myself to them and I just did not know how to interact. I think it was because I was too careful as I did not want to do anything that might make them unhappy or offend them. But later on during our sessions, I could see how sweet they are and I realised that they are very social and love interactions. I initially thought learning yoga to them might be a challenge for them. but now I understand how important it is for both our service students and our clients to spend time stretching our body and relaxing our mind.  when I go to university, I would like to involve in or create the same activity. Looking back, one huge challenge and pressure I had was trying to make my partner be more happy during the sessions which I think I managed to do even if the change was not that obvious. I still saw in the very last session how she did moves by herself without much guidance.