Yesterday I went to Sree Narayana Mission, a nursing home in Yishun, to volunteer. Calling it “volunteering” feels a bit generous, though — I spent most of the morning sitting off to the side doing AWS exam practice questions. I barely did any actual volunteering.

Twenty Volunteers for Five Residents

Some background first. A friend had mentioned this place to me before — it’s right near Yishun MRT, about a four-to-five minute walk. He said it’s mostly just chatting with the elderly, playing small games, that sort of thing. Sounded good, so I signed up for a Saturday session.

When I got there, reality hit: over twenty volunteers had shown up. There were only five or six elderly residents.

I stood at the entrance for a moment, thinking the ratio was absurd. The space itself wasn’t large — just three long tables. One had UNO going, another had Jenga, and the third had… how do I describe it… magnetic fishing. You know, the kids’ toy where little plastic fish open and close their mouths and you try to catch them with a tiny magnetic rod. I watched for a while and honestly felt a bit awkward — not because of the residents, but because the game itself was mind-numbingly boring. The elderly didn’t seem particularly into it either, but there was a ring of volunteers around them clapping and cheering. The whole scene was a bit surreal.

(Side note: I later learned that the game supplies are the same every time. They just rotate through the same handful of activities.)

The People in the Hallway

With nothing to do in the activity room, I stepped outside for a walk around.

That changed my mood. In the hallways, quite a few elderly residents sat quietly — mostly Chinese residents, not talking. Some were on IV drips, with caregivers wheeling the stands past them. Many of the caregivers were Indian, and the residents spoke Hokkien or Mandarin while the caregivers spoke English or Tamil. Basically everyone was in their own world, minimal interaction. One elderly person smiled at me. I didn’t know what to say, so I smiled back and kept walking.

In any case, that walk around the hallways hit harder than watching people fish for plastic fish.

Meeting Two People

The morning passed like that. After lunch, the elderly had mostly gone back to their rooms, and the twenty-odd volunteers were left standing around with nothing to do.

That’s when I noticed the two guys next to me were also just standing there. We started chatting and discovered they were first-timers too. Both worked in commodities trading — one in iron ore, the other in agricultural futures. The kind of people I’d never cross paths with in my normal life.

Once we got going, we couldn’t stop. From about 1 PM to past 4 PM, we talked about everything: our industries, families, the various pitfalls of getting kids into school in Singapore, PR applications — that last topic alone was an endless rabbit hole, with everyone having a pile of stories. It’s funny, really. Everyone’s anxieties are basically the same — immigration status, children’s education, career development — just replayed in different industries.

When we left, we exchanged WhatsApp and WeChat contacts. The plan is to coordinate before the next session instead of each signing up separately and bumping into each other by chance.

Everyone’s Here to Log Hours

Let’s address the elephant in the room. Most people who volunteer here have more or less the same motivation — apparently community service hours can help boost your PR application score, and a single day here counts as seven hours. Great ROI. That’s how you end up with twenty-plus volunteers competing to play Jenga with five elderly residents.

I had the same consideration. No point pretending otherwise. But the way I see it, even if everyone’s here to log hours, people did show up. The elderly did have company today, awkward as the experience might have been.

The real value of this kind of volunteering might not be what you do for the residents, but the people you meet who you’d never encounter otherwise. Everyone shows up for roughly the same reason, and somehow, genuine conversations happen.

I’ll probably go again. We’ve already made plans, after all.