featuring GIVE A GIGGLE
Helvetica and Times New Roman walk into a bar. “Get out of here!” shouts the bartender. “We don’t serve your type.”
This is my poor attempt at reproducing the amazing work of the charity I am featuring today.
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And now for the blog post.
‘Everything in my life collapsed all of a sudden. From having a job, a married life and wonderful children, to losing it all, living in graveyards and forests and bearing the diagnosis and reality of alcoholism.
During that year, my darkest year, I had many jobs. One of them was to cook in an old people’s home. I mean, the food we were meant to cook… it was not very flavoursome. I was a weekend cook there, and as I started working, the staff warned me about this one lady.
They said, there’s this blind lady, she had an operation and she got left blind, so she ended up getting stuck in the home, they said, she’s really fussy…
So I am cooking this stuff, I am trying to do the best I can, but it’s not very good, you know, I try to make it taste decent, but I don’t really know her taste. So one afternoon, I talk to her. I say: ‘what’s wrong with this food?’ She tells me what is wrong with the food, I try to fix it. From that day on, we carry on chatting.
Each time she comes into the dining room, we talk.
One day she says: ‘I haven’t had a nectarine in a really long time. It is my favourite fruit, the nectarine.’ She was a quirky lady, this lady, and she had a thing for nectarines. Now, I don’t like nectarines myself, but I went and bought her the fruit.
She was so grateful. She never gave me any trouble. No, not like I had been warned.
So from that day on, whenever I was on shift, I would bring her a bag of nectarines. They would last her the week.
But guess what, two months after that, one day all of a sudden, she moved on, but I think she left possibly a little bit happier…’
*Story given by Cal, one of the brave and generous people I had the honour to interview for my PhD.
THEODORA Children’s Charity and the #GIVEAGIGGLE campaign
Sometimes the smallest gestures and the ones we do not think are essential to someone’s wellbeing, are the ones which make the greatest impact. That is what Theodora Children’s Charity specialise in. This amazing charity sends professional performers (Giggle Doctors) to interact with children in hospitals, hospices and specialist care centres.
The Giggle Doctors visit the children and interact with them, be it with music, play, magic or storytelling or all of those combined, which make for magical moments for the children they visit. Each visit is child-led and the child participates in the interaction.
The children find themselves in challenging times and visits like this make a huge impact in their daily lives, which tend to otherwise be filled with a lot of hospital appointments and less fun.
The Giggle Doctors are there to provide whatever the child needs at that point in time, whether it is laughter or a song, a joke or just companionship. Some of the children the Giggle Doctors visit are very poorly and may not be well enough to laugh or even smile.
I was particularly moved by this testimonial:
‘As a parent with a child in hospital, you are constantly trying to find ways to keep your child amused and happy; which can be really tough. Then the Giggle Doctors visit and for that moment in time you can just sit back and see that your child is happy. (…) It alleviates the worry for that little while.’
Even more, what Cal’s story also highlights, these sessions of deep connection and communication between the Giggle Doctors and the participants can be really motivating for the person delivering them, and just as fulfilling for them as for the person receiving the joke. And if you go on Theodora’s website, you will find many testimonials which say exactly that: that more than a job, this is a labour of love.