Anchor Jun's words
If a coffee shop didn't have to pay just a chat with the clerk, would you go? There is one such coffee shop in Shanghai, where volunteers use coffee drinking time to accompany autistic people to learn to integrate into society.
At 188 Hanzhong Road in Shanghai, a special café runs:
Coffee drinks are limited to four and there are no desserts;
Business hours are from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm;
Customers do not need to pay but are trained;
The most different is the clerk here, they are all teenagers with autism.
The shop, called Coffee A, comes from the "Love Coffee - Autism Practice Base Public Welfare Project". Every customer who comes here is a volunteer who uses their coffee time to communicate with the clerks and help autistic teenagers grow in their company.
Here, companionship is not fragmentary and complex, but scene-based and concrete. It is with this simple but not simple companionship that autistic adolescents open their hearts, learn to communicate with others, and explore all possibilities for entering society.
Salon-classroom-café to accompany the whole process of growth
The "Love Coffee" project was founded by the famous conductor Cao Peng and his daughter Cao Xiaoxia, and now the project has been handed over to the third generation of the family, ShiDu Daner.
Shidu Daner told reporters that since high school, he has grown up with these "children of the stars" as a volunteer.
Through his narration, the idea of "Love Coffee" is not born out of thin air, before that, Shanghai Cao Peng Music Center has successively established "Angel Zhiyin Salon", "Love Classroom" and other public welfare projects. The process of project development is the process of volunteers accompanying autistic adolescents to grow up.
Cao Xiaoxia (first from right) with an autistic teenager Courtesy of an interviewer
2 April 2008 was designated as the first World Autism Day. In the same year, Shanghai Cao Peng Music Center and Shanghai Charity Foundation jointly founded the "Angel Zhiyin Salon", which organizers "let autistic children open themselves in melody and rhythm and develop the ability to communicate with the outside world" through weekly music salon activities.
Quieting children with music is not easy at first. Many teenagers with severe autism will run and jump, shout loudly, and some even throw musical instruments on the spot. In this case, what volunteers can do is to patiently accompany the children to vent their emotions, "Treat them, reasoning is the most useless." Volunteer Tang Li explained.
This process of companionship is also a process of trust building, and slowly children are willing to listen to the advice or requests of volunteers. Attention also shifted to music, and eventually a symphony orchestra could even be formed to complete a formal performance.
On the basis of the "Angel Confidant Salon", in order to meet the needs of autistic adolescents to receive education, the "Love Classroom" project came into being. Here, children learn a variety of basic knowledge and participate in social practice to improve their social skills. To help them complete these courses, they are accompanied and taught by volunteers anytime, anywhere.
In 2018, the first children to participate in the salon have grown into adults. How to help them find employment has become a heart disease for parents and volunteers.
After research, volunteers found that most of the autistic teenagers who went to society could only engage in simple repetitive work, such as placing books in the library, placing clothes in sportswear stores, or engaging in handicraft production.
In order to change this situation, Shanghai Cao Peng Music Center founded the "Love Coffee - Autism Practice Base Public Welfare Project", hoping to help every child learn a skill.
In this process, more and more unfamiliar faces appear in front of children's eyes, helping them learn to deal with strangers and learn to integrate into society.
Cafe Chat - a new attempt at immersive companionship
In fact, the choice of coffee is not arbitrary, but also for the sake of accompanying children.
Shidu Daner introduced that the way of making coffee is simple and easy to learn, and the cup rate is high, and autistic children can have more time to communicate with volunteers in cafes and learn to integrate into society.
Pushing open the door of A Coffee, the 200-square-meter storefront is covered with several square tables covered with plaid cloth, and the tables are surrounded by various stools, and if it is a first-time visitor, "customers" can easily recognize this place as a school activity room.
From the moment you enter the door, the volunteers' accompaniment work begins.
Volunteer Tang Li will take time out of her week to go to A Coffee. Most of the time, she would order a latte for the next three hours, and sometimes she would deliberately ask the barista for advice, "What you want to do, then have a cup." The purpose of this kind of scene-based dialogue is to encourage autistic adolescents to take the initiative to share and communicate.
Any scene that may happen in an ordinary café, A coffee will not be less. Grinding coffee beans, sprinkling coffee powder, beating milk foam, the barista here is almost the same as other counterparts.
Volunteer chats with shop assistants can also happen at any time, what are the types of coffee? What are the steps to make coffee? What's been going on lately... These topics have the potential to be the "opening words" of a volunteer service.
Chatting may seem simple but isn't easy.
Xiaoling (pseudonym) is the last to arrive at the store. When he first arrived at the store, he could not communicate at any time, and Tang Li and several volunteers visited him. Someone asked, "how much is a cup of coffee", he was confused, casually said a sentence of "3 pieces", but it did not take long to reflect it, said less, and added "5 pieces". When someone asks him, "What did you do today," he will say that he has learned a poem, which he actually learned a long time ago.
Whenever this happens, volunteers should not show impatience, but should listen patiently and look for content that may be of interest to the other party.
According to Shidu Daner, in order to better serve autistic teenagers, every volunteer who participates in the activity must go through training. In the process of service, the supervisor teacher will also be arranged to accompany, and once there is no way to talk, there will be someone to urgently "save the scene".
It is understood that the source of volunteers is constantly expanding, and a total of more than 6,700 people have signed up for the project. "A lot of volunteers come from different professions, and they bring more knowledge in different areas to the children in the chat." Shidu Daner said.
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Komsomol News Network (ID:gqviewpoint)
Journalist/Editor | Yang Baoguang
Coordinate | Chen Fengli
Source: Komsomol News Network