So one week down in the community already and it feels as
though we’ve been busy busy busy but what have we actually achieved so far? Well
um not much to be honest besides admin work and meetings. That’s what it feels
like anyway but reflecting back on the week we have learnt a lot of valuable lessons
already. This is what I’ve learnt in 4 days:
1.
The importance of immersing yourself into the
community in which you will do work- we have spent a lot of our time this week
walking around meeting people; introducing ourselves; getting to know the roles
of some of the individuals in the community and really just saying hey what is
this community all about and what’s going on here. Ideally to really get to know
your community will take alllooooot of time but unfortunately we only have six
weeks in Mariannridge so our time to do this is severely limited but hey I guess
this will be a continuous process throughout our time spent there
2.
It’s all about the community members, NOT US and
what we want! After all we are the outsiders- as therapists we are all used to working
in hospitals were quite honestly what the therapists want to do and when they
want to do it is what the client will do and when they will do it. But not in
the community as we realised. We are required to do home visits to individuals
houses as a team of therapists (speech therapists; audio’s and OT’s) along with
the CCG’s (community care givers) who take us along to all the houses. So we
went to the CCG’s this week ready to do our home visits with them but to our
horror they told us we could only start with home visits next week as the
client’s had been informed that this is when we are coming to them and so they
will not be ready for us this week. This upset us greatly as we only have two
days together as a full team as next week has a public holiday and the
following week we have to present our clients to our supervisors as part of our
formal assessment. So in our minds we HAD to go to their house this week no
matter what. But then we sat back and thought about it. We are going into their
homes and are offering a service to them- surely they have the right to say
when it suits them to allow us in and when they would like to receive the
treatment we want to give them. The answer is not to just go and force ourselves
on these clients because hey we giving them a free service they need. No the
answer is the presentations can wait, we will go when they want us to go.
3.
Nothing is instant- so a lot of our time this
week has been spent meeting with people to propose work and projects we would
like to begin in various areas in the community. Even though we have had these
meetings there is still a lot of groundwork to be done before these projects
will actually begin to happen. It has been frustrating me so much because I feel
like we doing all this stuff but getting nowhere. But actually I’ve realised
now that the groundwork is probably the most important stage of all our work in
the community. Starting that process; creating those networks; digging out
those paths is the real work- actually doing the stuff in the end is the easy
part.
4.
Bonding with our team- its funny to think that
we have all been on the same campus, actually been in endless amounts of
lectures together for the last three years and still we do not know a single
thing about each other and what work each of us does. Im referring to the
speech therapist and audiologists here who are part of our team in the
community. We spent part of our morning on Thursday with the audiologists who
were performing hearing tests on the grade one students (we ended up here
mainly as a result of not being able to do our home visits but lets just
pretend we had always planned on going there) we got chatting with all of them
and eventually they actually invited us to do some of the testing on the
students that they were doing. WOW it was amazing and such good fun. At first
we felt a bit guilty that we had ‘wasted time’ but no we had not. We had
already formed such a bond with them and we got talking about our work and what
they have been doing in the community- we shared experiences and we told them
about our projects that we had plans for in the community. They showed so much
interest in us because we had shown interest in them and as a result they are
now contributing to many of our projects. Yes we could’ve sent them a message-
told them what we were doing on whatever day and asked them to join in but the
result would’ve been that they wouldn’t have shown any interest in our work. But
because we made the effort, created those NETWORKS and RELATIONSHIPS they
wanted to reciprocate. Just getting an understanding of their work and what
they do made it so easy for us to see where they could contribute to the work
we are planning on doing. And honestly the more the merrier right? Who wants to
do all the work anyway
So what can I say but there are exciting things to come in
the next few weeks and these definitely are not the end of the lessons I will
be learning J
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