At St Christopher's - Week 2

I was much less apprehensive this week due to being accustomed with the type of people that I will be meeting and the atmosphere of the environment. Upon arrival we met in the garden area again and the atmosphere was the same as last week; I immediately felt at ease and was not nervous at all. However, I knew we were very lucky last week with the amount of participants we had, so was slightly anxious about numbers. But, we had the same number - about 10 with some people from last week and a few new people.

This week at St Christopher's we began the same way that we did last week, with the name, action and sound. This seemed to make the new participants slightly less daunted and was a good way to boost energy. Some of the retuning patients couldn't remember their actions from last week, so they either changed them or we reminded them. It was difficult for some of the patients because they said they couldn't do much any more because of their illnesses and it was a shame that they felt they couldn't come up with anything they liked doing any more. Perhaps in future weeks we need to think about how we phrase/go about the exercise so as not to make anyone upset or feel like they don't have anything to contribute.

We then had a session of sharing some of the things we have created over the past few sessions, and we sang the Nigerian national anthem that Ruth taught us. This was for a lady who was Nigerian and really enjoyed Nigerian music, and fortunately she was there this week and joined in with the singing. She really appreciated this, and it was good feedback to know that she was comfortable with us singing this and would like us to put it in the final performance.

Jasmine also shared the poem she had written based on the lives of three of the participants - Bob, Daphne and Mad Max, all of whom were at the session. They all listened intently and some of them had tears in their eyes from being moved with her words, in a positive way. This was lovely to see, and obviously meant that her words had touched them. We made sure that they were happy for the poem to go into the final piece and they all agreed which was constructive.

We then got into groups of two or three and had conversations with the patients again, which was very interesting. The scope of this week's conversation was a moment of pride and someone who has been important in their lives. I was speaking to a man called Bob and he had a lot of interesting stories to tell me about. I thought it was a tricky question to ask who had been a major person in their lives, but Bob seemed to enjoy the question, informing us about his Brazilian girlfriend.

On the whole, I thought the session was very positive and generated lots of material that we can use for the performance. I thought it was nice to see some new people, and hope they enjoyed their time with us and will return next week.