Ships Ahoy...Ok Not Quite

Life at the Vietnam Children's Hospital on the floors where I am spending my time can get very tedious for the children who are long term patients their, this is because there is very little by way of entertainment for them; there are no televisions, dvd players or electronic games, in fact what they have can easily be noted as follows: books, crayons, photo-copied pictures to colour in and some make shift games. I am sure you will agree that this is not much and is likely to have very little or no effect in taking the children's minds off their pain and suffering.

My aim when I am at the hospital is to try to keep the children entertained and have some fun with them to take their minds off the fact that they are stuck in hospital this is by carryig out arts and crafts activities and playing games with them etc.

Today at the hospital Huan (in the picture below) who has been a patient for over a month now (so you can imagine how bored he may be getting), asked me to make a paper boat to which my response was a very enthusiastic nod with a big smiley face, because having made lots of paper boats and Emu's with my brother as a kid I thought to myself yes this is is going to impress him and he is gonna love it! You will note however, that Huan is not looking very impressed...



Why you might wonder, well this is how my 'boat' turned out...




...a piece of paper folded several times. All I can say is I tried and I tried but I just couldn't remeber how to do it, yes I was mortified but it got worse when Huan called his little friend over to show him my disaster of a boat who you will see was as equally unimpressed - oh dear!



I can confirm that I felt like a bit of a 'silly billy' to say the least given the enthusiasm and confidence I had shown when I was first asked to make it. I had to redeem myself before the afternoon was over! So what did I do? I moved on rather swiftly back to the activity I had started with which was making animal face masks such as cats, rabbits and elephants. I can say without doubt and you will agree from the picture that this was a success and saved the day.



In the end not only did we learn how to make face masks, but we also learnt the different names for the animals in English and Vietnamese.

To summarise my afternoon at the hospital, I would say we had a good laugh at my lack of boat making skills, we learnt how to make masks, we had a Vietnamese and English speaking lesson but most importantly I hope the children forgot about where they were for a just few minutes during that time because that is what it is all about.