The smell of frying garlic and ginger is inescapable as it wafts through the room, while a row of fidgety kids watches an older woman in a blue plaid apron cooking in front of them.
“When I was growing up my mom used to make this a lot,” she says, showing a chicken stir fry recipe.
At this “Intergenerational Summer Camp” in a Southern California suburb, the grandmas are in charge. Every week, they taught a group of 8-to-14-year-olds how to cook a new dish and a do a handicraft such as sewing, embroidering, clay jewelry and card marking.
“Isolation and loneliness is something that seniors are challenged with, and they love having younger people around them,” said Zainab Hussain, a program manager at Olive Community Services, a nonprofit aimed at bringing older adults together that hosted the camp.
The camp was held at a community center in Fullerton, a city in Orange County that’s home to a large Arab population, and many of the campers and grandmas come from those communities. In between activities, the small room bustled with energy as the girls chatted and munched on snacks. Some of the volunteer grandmas milled around and watched, content to just be around the youngsters.
In July, during the final week of camp, Janna Moten and her friends were learning how to use a sewing machine and make pouches.
“Slowly, slowly,” one grandma chided as Moten stomped on the machine’s pedal, causing the needle to rapidly jerk up and down.
She pressed her foot down again, gingerly, and managed to sew a straight line.
“Honestly, I’m just here for the food,” the 9 year old quipped. Still, she beamed as she showed the two pieces of fabric she sewed together and turned inside out, forming a rectangular pocket.
Moten said she’s been practicing hand-stitching at home after learning embroidery a previous week.
“Sewing’s pretty easy, it’s just hard keeping the lines straight,” she said. She added that her own grandma was stricter than the ones at summer camp.
Haqiqah Abdul Rahim, the instructor for sewing, said many kids don’t learn these skills at school anymore through home economics classes, so they’re “filling in a gap.”
She stood in front of the room at the start of the activity, holding up various tools and explaining what they were: seam roller, thread snipper, rotary fabric cutter.
Rahim also doesn’t get to spend a lot of time with her grandchildren because they don’t live close.
“It is heartwarming to be able to interact with those who love being around you,” Rahim said.
The kids have learned about kitchen safety and how to cook with a grandma’s touch — such as mixing spices with water before adding them to a dish so they don’t burn, or using fresh turmeric.
The summer camp was held in partnership with the Golden Connections Club, started by high school student Leena Albinali last year to foster interactions between teens and elders.
The 14-year-old lives with her grandma but realized other students didn’t have the same opportunity to spend as much time with their grandparents. She also learned about ageism and other challenges faced by senior adults in one of her classes.
At monthly lunches, they invite seniors to the school and discuss topics where both groups can learn from each other, Albinali said.
“They treat us like we’re their grandchildren,” she said. The teens share what they know about artificial intelligence and its impact on their lives, and the elders share life stories and advice.
One of the most important things they’ve shared with her is to live in the moment, something that’s taken on new meaning for her.
“The people we have right now, they’re not going to be with us forever,” she said.
