The following audio interviews were recorded at the City of Vancouver’s Hillcrest Centre around 5pm on March 30th. The Centre is one of two dozen city-run community centres, which provide recreational, social, and cultural activities for all city residents, according to the City’s website.  The Hillcrest Centre is one of the City’s largest, and has gym and sports facilities, including a pool and ice rink, as weel as a public library (Terry Salman Branch).

There centre was busy, with children playing, and mothers and grandparents who were waiting for kids to finish their classes.

Today’s approach

• Instead of using the word “loneliness”, we started to use “social isolation”

Approaching and interviewing people was not easy.  Some people declined our invites to talk, even without knowledge of the subject we wanted to discuss.  Others were more willing:

Not surprisingly, once we stopped recording but had already established a comfortable connection with this woman, she continued the conversation.  She said she is too busy to seek new friends, and is not necessarily looking for them because she already has a family, a career, and existing friends.  Really what she needs more of is personal time to spend in solitude.  In fact, the 30 minutes during which we interviewed her and continued our discussion is normally the only time she has daily to spend by herself reading the newspaper and being alone.