Reported by Jenny Lin
Posted by Karen Li
On Saturday, April 19th, 7 AYLUS volunteers came to provide company and help people with special needs at the Dallas Chinese Fellowship Church, as the Special Needs Agape program taught them about Christianity. The event started at 10:15 AM, where volunteers were assigned specific people to work with and got familiar with them (if new to the program) or re-familiarized themselves with them. The first activity included worship (in English and Chinese) and dancing, which then after a prayer, transitioned to explanations of biblical stories (within the context of Good Friday and Easter), with dances done in-between. Meanwhile, the assistants of the special needs gave them fake money to practice use of money as well as to reward them for doing well. Then, there was an event to which all volunteers and their special needs friends went outside to collect plastic eggs, each with candy and a Bible verse inside. We had to be careful to keep the special needs people from going out onto the road, however, some special needs friends were especially excited to collect eggs, and collected a whole bag-full! Then, they were able to exchange their money from the worship time to get snacks. After snack time, we did arts and crafts, and then exercise videos and some additional dancing. It could be seen that the special needs friends had warmed up to dancing more and more (especially with the money rewards), which was great to see! At 12:15, we each signed out as the special needs people started lunch. All in all, we are happy to be able to accompany these people, see them improve, and experience a lot of fun with them!
Volunteers:
Jenny Lin – 4 hours (Event Leader)
Cheng Jing Lee – 3 hours
Elin Wang – 3 hours
Andrew Wang – 3 hours
Zicheng Tian – 3 hours
Jiahe Tian – 3 hours
Audrey Cheng – 3 hours
Judy Ning (Supervising parent) – 4 hours
Li Wan (Supporting parent) – 4 hours
