Making Plans

I'm feeling pretty proud of myself because this week I've made a lot of my own plans and am feeling pretty independent here. On Monday I went around to a lot of different locations - the health center, the hospitalito, the new hospitalito construction site, the library, the Pueblo a Pueblo office (an organization that sponsors and helps children and pregnant women). In all of those places I talked to people, some I knew already and some I just met, and made a lot of plans for the rest of the week. I've been trying to find out about a small nursing school here in Santiago, and I finally talked to a nurse at the hospitalito who attended the school and she gave me the phone number of the teacher. Everything I do here is a new experience... I had never had a phone conversation in Spanish and was a little worried I'd have a hard time understanding without being face to face. But it went well and the teacher told me to come to her center on Thursday to chat with her, and finding the place should be an adventure in itself since the only direction I have is that it is a house over the bank, but there's no sign out front and from the outside I can't see how to get up there! And then once I'm there I'll be having more of an interview type conversation, since I would like to find out what nursing education is like here.

Sometimes my plans don't always work out like I planned... earlier today, for example, I went to the health center because I thought I would be observing and helping the nurses, but it turned out I was just helping one nurse fill out charts of children's vaccinations in the different areas of Santiago. Which, like everything else, was a new experience, but it was kind of a boring one. I was still helping them out though and the nurse appreciated my help, so I felt good about it.

And sometimes my planning works out really well, like this morning when I went to a school in town and had prepared a short lesson on health. Lisa was there and she had supplied me with a picture book to use to base the lesson on, but I prepared and led it all on my own. I made copies of some of the pictures, and brought in posterboard to made simple posters with the classes. I led two classes, first reading them a story, then asking them to remember important ways to stay healthy from the story, and finally asking for help attaching the pictures to the posterboard (we had one side for "good things" and one for "bad things"). While it's hard to tell how much of an impact the lesson had on the classes, I was glad that they paid attention (for the most part) and the teachers thanked us on the way out.

I'm getting a great feeling from everything I do here, and I can't wait to see what else happens in the next two weeks.