Assisted Living residents visit Assumption College

"It always pays to be nice," said Molly, a resident of Eisenberg Assisted Living Residence who had her paper read by Professor Lucia Knowles in front of her class. "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it at all." This simple yet powerful statement expressed how Molly views life in a positive way: being kind and respectful to others. Molly, who had just celebrated her hundredth birthday two weeks ago had a lot of interesting advice she shared with Knowles' speech class. 

This special event took place on a Thursday at 10 a.m., where the speech class had planned it for the residents of Eisenberg. The speech class' month of planning and preparations were made in order to invite the Eisenberg residents up to Assumption, share stories of life experiences with each other, take them to lunch at Taylor Dining Hall and then give them tours of the campus. Before this day, there were many challenges and obstacles that the class had to figure in a limited amount of time in order to make this happen. 

"I think the biggest challenge that my classmates, myself included, was to get the whole project together in a timely manner," said junior Stephanie O'Rourke, one of the students of the project. "Whenever we had a meeting about what we needed to get done, we tended to stray off the topic and never really accomplished what we wanted in the meeting." 

Fortunately, the class made a huge change with great determination and hard work to organize and prepare everything to make this project possible. "Toward the end, we finally realized what we needed to do to be organized and focus on what we needed to get done," continued O'Rourke. "We pulled through in the end with a big bang and I think we even impressed with ourselves with how well it went."

The class waited eagerly outside of the Information Technology Center to greet and help the elderly visitors get into one of the classrooms. When everyone was situated and the introduction was made, the Eisenberg residents began to tell stories about their lives, their experiences and what they believed in. Many of the residents talked about what their lives were like and what they experienced and enjoyed most about it. Esther was another resident who talked about her belief in a good marriage. To support her claim, she stated that she has been married for 65 years.

"My husband was a great, loving man," she said. Esther continued her story about how her husband would do things for her that she wanted done. "When I wanted something, he would go out of his way and get it for me, no questions asked, all because he loved me."

Another resident, Knowles' father, Joe, talked about how eating out at different places around the world was a life altering experience for him and his family because they bonded during the times they went out to eat.

The class project was all about connecting and reaching out to people while developing organizational and speaking skills and making a commitment to better the students' experiences overall. This is also the reasons why some of the students shared their stories with the residents. Many of their stories were very interesting and inspiring, which really hit the hearts of everyone that was in the classroom. One of the students Devin Raeli, told his miraculous story of how he almost died when he was a newborn from a heart murmur and had to go under open heart surgery. 

"I wanted to read the article because I was very passionate about it," said Raeli, "It made me think how I lucky I am today and that I'm healthy, plus I knew the residents would enjoy listening to it as well." 

From the speeches that were shared among the students and the residents, impacts and bonds were made. We were beginning to understand one another and learn how similar we really are with their stories, despite the age difference. "Yes, it definitely created a bond between the residents and I," said Raeli. "I know that some of the residents have health related conditions so obviously we could relate but yeah, the bond I could tell was very strong between us."