3/30/2015
These past two weeks flew by and were full of fun events.
First I will go back all the way back to St. Patrick’s Day. My site mates and I
got together for dinner at our favorite restaurant and then went on a mini bar
crawl around our town (which only has three “bars”, more like small restaurants
that will serve us beer). It was fun to chat over a couple beers. When you live
in a country where none of the holidays you used to celebrate are celebrated,
you actually forget when they are. Also, every American holiday just feels like
a normal day and is the same: we cook chicken and have a salad, because that is
considered a splurge on our Peace Corps salaries. It will be so exciting to get
back to the States and celebrate holidays like I used to!
March 20-22 we had Language IST, which meant two Mongolian
language teachers from the capital city came out to our province to teach us
Mongolian for three days. Our soum volunteers came into the aimag center and we
had Mongolian lessons from 9am-6pm those three days. The days were a mix of
group lessons and individual tutoring. The teachers were really great and I
learned a couple new useful phrases for work and new verb tenses. Although, at this
stage in the game, I feel as though I have learned as much as I am going to
learn; I am certainly not studying Mongolian anymore, but it was nice to work
on my pronunciation a bit. I have another language test at the end of April, so
it will be interesting to see if I improved at all since my last test.
Following language IST, Monday and Tuesday I facilitated a
two day Nursing Seminar with another volunteer and my main counterpart. 20
recent graduates of nursing school came to the seminar to learn about nursing
practices and how to improve care of patients in their hospitals. It was a lot
of fun and I think they enjoyed the training a lot. The first day was lectures
on various nursing topics and the second day was clinical practice. I loved the
second day. It was so great to watch them put into practice what they had
learned the day before. We started off by practicing CPR and the Heimlich. They
took turns practicing on one another (just going through the motions, not
actually preforming CPR on one another). Eventually, this led to me being the
dummy for all of the trainees. They all wanted to practice on me and have the
other volunteer give them advice while she watched. The male nurses were a
little too happy to be practicing CPR on me. Haha, they were the first ones to
volunteer! We then had them practice bed side manner and doing a full body
assessment on a patient. We taught them about listening to bowel sounds,
something they did not know about and how to properly take blood pressure. On
the second day we had a guest lecturer, a JICA volunteer who is a physical
therapist. JICA is basically the Japanese equivalent to Peace Corps. The JICA
volunteer taught the nurses how to do range of motion exercises and how to
properly transport a patient from a wheelchair to the bed. The nurses were so
involved and asked so many great questions throughout both of the days. It was
really interesting to hear about their experiences in Nursing School and what
health laws and practices are like in Mongolia (sooo different as you can
imagine!).
Thursday was Doctors’ Day celebration. Many doctors from all
over the province came in for a week long competition. I went to the question
and answer competition and watched. My counterpart won the competition, but he
was also in charge of writing the questions for the competition. Haha. So did
he truly deserve first place, no, but no one seemed to realize that he wrote
the questions and then competed. Well done Ariuk. Well done.
That Friday, was the English Pyramid Competition for
students in grades 9-12. Each school in the province sent a team of 4 students
to compete in the competition. The competition had three parts to it: a
question and answer portion, Taboo and a Jeopardy game. The students were each
given two essays that we Peace Corps volunteers wrote and they had to
memorize/study for the question and answer and Jeopardy parts. Four other
volunteers and I were in charge of running the competition: asking the
questions, setting up each portion and tallying the scores at the end. I had
worked with School #2 for a few days before the competition, preparing them for
the three sections. They ended up placing 4th in the competition,
which they were super upset about, because last year we won 1st
place. This year a lot of the school who performed poorly last year, really
stepped it up and the entire top 5 were within 10 points from one another. One
of the schools did not understand the rules and sent four 9th grade
girls to the competition. So they had no one to compete in the 10th
and 11th grade portions and only studied the 9th grade
essay. Jeopardy is based off of a third essay that all the grades were supposed
to study. So when it came time for Jeopardy, they were hilarious to watch play.
They knew nothing about the subject and their answers were hilarious. I think
they guessed Russia and 6 for most questions. But they just sat their giggling
the whole time, no care in the world they were going to come in last place.
While students were stressed and one even hit another team mate in the face
when he answered a question wrong, these 4 girls were just happy to have a
field trip out of school. For the most part, all the students were great sports
and tried so hard to win points for their teams. I had a great time watching
them.
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