The Serbian Association for Alzheimer Disease had a very busy September. In addition to their regular activities, they organised two new public activities to celebrate World Alzheimer's Day, which represent exciting opportunities to educate people, fight stigma, and bring dementia into the focus of public and political representatives.
The first was “Happy Volleyball Hour”, a multigenerational play hour between elementary school children and participants from the association’s half-day care programme. The aim was to promote understanding and empathy for people living with dementia.
Secondly, they organised a literary for high school students, a successful and interesting way to break the stigma around Alzheimer and dementia. The literary competition for high school students had the theme “Living with Dementia”. The winner was “Fog”, by Neda Simonović, whose poetic words “truly captured the emotional state of people living with dementia and their loved ones”:
Fog
Fog, noise, it’s not complete silence. Even though the road is ahead of you, somehow, you’re lost. I wonder what it's like to forget life? Is it scary to be in constant fog? Maybe it’s even a mercy to forget all the suffering and pains of this world. The burden disappears from your back and heart, but the body still remembers. Some memories, even if they seem meaningless now, stay so deeply embedded within us. In the fog, everyone around you is saying something. Do you remember your child? And the christening? So many questions, but only fog and a small “lump” in your throat that keeps growing. Is that shame? Is that empathy without understanding? It feels as if that lump keeps growing within your throat. And what is that fog? That harsh, quiet, depressing force that slowly falls on an old mind. The warm home and soft memories replaced by the sterile smell of the hospital. And fog, like a silk curtain, cuts through all memories. And what about those who remember them? Those who are outside the fog, like the audience to that quiet death of the mind? And just those moments when the fog disappears. When sight and mind return, tears flow in the eyes of those loved, children and grandchildren, and everyone at least sheds a tear. That moment is so special, precious, but unfortunately rare. When it ends, that family painfully sobs, and the fog falls again.
When the body withers, it can somehow be healed. But when the mind clouds, there's no way back.
— Neda Simonović, S43 Technical School GSP —Mentor: Sanja Vukobrat
