For six years, retiree Yeh Yu-yi (葉裕益) has single-handedly cared for more than a dozen senior citizens in Taipei through his non-profit day care program called “Wheelchair Kindergarten.”
Every weekday at 8:30am, 66-year-old Yeh meets his elderly regulars in Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall Square to entertain them with music, singing and group activities until their families are ready to take them home, a routine he has followed since 2009.
Daan District Office Director Su Su-chen (蘇素珍) said the office was inspired by Yeh and adopted a sister program for senior citizens in March this year. After two trials in the Chengkung public housing complex — a former military community with a heavy concentration of senior citizens — the program has met an enthusiastic response.
Yeh said the average age of the group’s members is about 90, many of whom are afflicted by Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, or have had strokes.
Yeh was a successful businessman before retiring to care for his mother.
Yeh worked for Pacific Group’s Allis Electric company, rising from a section manager at the firm to vice president. He later worked for Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp when the organization was still a preparatory office.
By then, Yeh’s mother was entering her 100th year, and as her birthday approached Yeh said he began to wonder if he wanted to spend the last years of her life differently.
“I realized that my mother was old and there was little time left,” Yeh said.
He decided to quit his career and spend time caring for his mother in her twilight years. The inspiration for an elderly day care program came from taking his mother on daily wheelchair strolls in the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall Square, he said.
“There were so many elderly people in their wheelchairs with foreign caregivers, and they were just languishing there with nothing to do,” he said, adding that he thought they needed activities and entertainment.
The greatest initial obstacle was convincing the caregivers that they should give the program a chance, Yeh said.
However, Yeh said he overcame their resistance after he provided snacks and beverages and communicated with them in English and some Filipino and Indonesian phrases he had picked up.
The caregivers were gradually convinced of his goodwill and began to bring their elderly charges to his “classes” on a regular basis.
Yeh said he discovered many of the attendees preferred to converse in Japanese with him. He also found that the elderly men and women enjoyed singing, so he gathered Japanese folk songs, such as Momotaro, Tokyo Onto and Kagome Kagome, from the Internet and printed songbooks.
As they sang, Yeh played the harmonica and performed sketches of physical comedy, or told stories and jokes to draw them out, he said.
Six years of managing his “kindergarten” had given him a unique perspective in elderly care, Yeh said, adding the government’s elderly care policies are too narrowly focused on health and the solvency of their finances.
Though health is important, aging is inevitable, and regardless of the quality of the medical and financial resources that are made available, they will lose the functionality of their bodies because “all machines wear out in the end,” Yeh said.
Long-term care policymakers should think more about the elderly’s quality of life “in their final journey,” he said.
Yeh said he observed many elderly men and women in the square who looked sadly into the distance while sitting in their wheelchairs with nothing to do.
According to Yeh, one of the elderly people said: “I am old and useless. I lived so many years, but I do not know what is the point of life. I want to pass away soon.”
He said experiences such as that made him think that long-term care should begin and end with “the person,” to care for both the body and the mind, adding: “We should preserve their happiness and dignity at the end of their roads.”
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) has announced plans to trim city deficits by limiting the “Double Ninth Festival stipend for honoring the elderly,” a budget for the lunar calendar festival honoring the elderly on the ninth day of the ninth month on the lunar calendar — to NT$1,500 to those over aged 65 in low-income families and NT$10,000 to those aged over 99.
Yeh said the importance of the stipend is in honoring senior citizens, not in its meager monetary value, adding that the elderly appreciate the stipend because it means district chiefs and borough wardens visit them in person to deliver the money, a reminder that they have not been forgotten by society.
The city government could replace cash with small gifts like cakes to strike a better balance between economizing and caring for the elderly, he said.
Yeh called on the government to protect the rights of senior citizens by regulating foreign caregivers in its long-term care policies.
A system combining professional education and licensing for foreign caregivers might prevent occurrences of abuse, he said, adding this is a priority because modern families increasingly rely on employing foreign workers to care for elderly people in order to work and incidents of abuse are frequently reported.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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