Funny stories about Dragon Boat Festival shared among elderly friends
The annual Dragon Boat Festival or Tuen Ng Festival is one of the important holidays in Hong Kong in memory of the life and death of Qu Yan, a famous Chinese poet. There are many traditions and stories about Dragon Boat Festival. To bring a fun afternoon to the elderly in the Western District, the Project Leaders Teresa Lo and Ambrose Ng organized an event with a theme on Dragon Boat Festival. A total of 15 seniors and 8 volunteers were gathered at the Western District Elderly Community Center last June 17, 2023.
Teresa prepared an online game “Find the differences” for the elderly participants. There were totally five pairs of animated pictures with 3 differences for us to identify in 30 seconds. Our volunteers could not compete with the sharpness of our seniors who could find the three differences in less than 30 seconds.
After the warm-up game, we then quickly moved on to Mini Quiz with questions about the traditions of Tuen Ng Festival such as what kind of leaves to wrap the rice dumpling or how to store the dragon boat after the festival. Some elderly guests also shared some of the myths and stories about the Dragon Boat Festival which were unknown to our volunteers.
Finally, we taught the elderly guests how to use some colour papers to make a rice dumpling. The afternoon was filled with laughers and fun.
One of the volunteers, Judy Tung, said, “We learnt a lot about the Dragon Boat Festival and how to make paper rice dumpling at the event.”
