Name: Becky
Occupation: Student/Occassional Auxiliary Nurse/ABA Therapist/Serial traveller/owner of itchy feet
Home Towm: Bangor, North Wales
Current Location: Bangor



Links
Amy
Ben
Carl
Harriet
Helen
Lou


Friday, May 09, 2008
Week of work  
Well, perhaps only three days of actual work, but I worked hard, so it was like a whole week.
Wednesday I went to the orphanage, which is also a school, and spent a morning trying to teach about 40 rowdy 2-10 year old kids three different classes all at once(I think that alone qualifies as a weeks worth of work)! When they were doing as they should be it was quite fun, when they were pulling each other of chairs and hitting the small kids with chalk boards it wasn't so good. Luckily, they finished earlier than the other classes so I escaped and went a joined a class of seven older children (12-14ish I think), and they asked me questions about England, mainly where various football teams were located and got very confused when I told them Manchester United wasn't the name of a town and that Arsenal and Chelsea are both from London! They were a lovely group, one of them I had met the day before and she had asked the names and ages of my brothers, then announced that she was going to 'write Sam', and as I was leaving she produced a heart-adorned letter written in pink to Sam saying she loved him- don't say I never do anything for you Sam!

The next day I went back to that class and spent the morning teaching them English Language and science which was very enjoyable, made me quite want to teach, but I think I would enjoy it much less if it was a less pleasant class. It was interesting teaching a class where the kids don't all have pens and paper, everything written was done on the board, and where resources in general are lacking. The younger class I took had no books, so I had to invent everything that was taught, the older group did have text books, but had the class been any bigger there wouldn't have been enough.

I had planned to try to go back today but Paschal had already arranged for me to start at the clinic. I met the head doctor there yesterday who was very nice, but didn't get to see her before I started this morning, so had no chance to discuss the kind of work I would like to do, so ended up watching a nurse taking blood pressures and temperatures and then writing them and the details of the patient in a big book, then the diagnosis (invariably malaria- there were at least 30 cases in the 40 patients we saw!) when they had seen the doc. Not the most productive way I could have spent the morning, but apparently I'm going to be working in the recovery room on Monday so I might get to put canulas in and set up fluids and other exciting things. If I do get to do more it should be a pretty exciting couple of weeks.

3:55 PM
Comment (0) ... PermaLink