What is a fulfilled life? Does it mean to be busy everyday in pursuit of fame and fortune? Or it means the positive life attitude when facing the setbacks in our life? The Philippine patients from Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou gave the answer and showed the world their love for life through their practical actions.

July 1, 2014, 3:00 p.m., the latest Chinese learning class started in the conference room of Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou, China on time. Patients from Philippines as well as their relatives actively participated in this activity. This class was targeted at the patients and their relatives who speak English. The content was presented in paper by Liu Kang, translator from the hospital interpreter department. The theme of the class was “Learning directions as well as the numeral expression in Chinese”.

Teacher Liu was taughting the pronunciation

Actively guided by  teacher Liu, soon all the students in the class were engaged in the learning of Chinese. The first part of the class was to learn directions. Through observation and imitation, the students quickly learnt many places in Chinese, and then they started to use those words to make sentences according to teacher Liu’s requirements. “qing wen zui jin de ce suo zai na li?”(Where is the toilet nearby?) “qing wen zen me qu wan ling hui?”(How can I get to the Onelink?) “shi chang zai na li?” (Where is the market?) It was surprising to see that all students can basically give correct answer, although their pronunciation was not so accurate. Among them, one student even raced to be the first to answer the teacher’s question. At this moment, the other students in the class gave him a warm applause. When it came to the second part of learning the numeral expression, teacher Liu taught the students a very useful tip: If one want to pronounce a binary digit number, he or she can firstly confirm the pronunciation of the tens digit and units digit, and then run them together. Taking the number “24” for example, one can first pronounce “er shi”, which means “twenty”, and then speak out “si”, which means “four”. When he or she links all the words, it comes to the pronunciation as “er-shi-si”, which means “twenty four”. Soon all students understood the rule and they raced to give answer to the teacher’s question, which they regarded as an interesting game. Therefore, an amazing picture was presented: a group of foreign students, though suffering from cancer or being old, studied like newborn babies, with the purest enthusiasm. Among those students, a patient came to the class in her wheelchair. With infusion needle in one arm, a patient had to use another arm to take notes… However, there were sunny smile on each patient’s face.

Patients were taking notes carefully

She had to use the hand without infusion needle to take notes

The guy raced to answer the question

The purpose of Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou holding “Chinese Learning Class” is to provide the patients with convenience of communicating with others, helping them relieve loneliness and making their outing in China more easier and convenient. Through such activity organized by the Interpreter Department of the hospital, patients and their families can have diverse enjoyment during hospitalization. At the same time, mental pleasure will also be very helpful for their treatment. By walking outside the ward and actively participating in various kinds of activities, those patients showed the world their love for life: STEP FORWARD POSITIVELY, and NEVER GIVE UP! This small class contains great wisdom of life.

It is interesting to learn Chinese

*Surgery, in addition to the appropriate chemotherapy and radiotherapy, are effective in treating early cancer, but certain patients in late stage of cancer may not be tolerate surgery well as they can be relatively weak. A combination of carefully planned minimally invasive therapy, chemotherapy or radiotherapy can effectively reduce the side effects and discomfort of treatment and may help patient get better efficacy.