Life as a Student in Liverpool and No Helping Hands!

My dinner as a student. No helping hands!

As you know if you have read any of my posts, no one eats until a picture of dinner is taken. So…I took a picture of my second dinner in Liverpool. Meals are very different without helping hands. I am following Gary’s lead and when there is no food in the pantry or when you must cook for yourself–you eat cereal! Of course my favorite addition to dinner is the Nescafe–which is the official coffee of every Peace Corps volunteer and the official coffee of every developing country. Bangladesh had the best Nescafe as Patty remembers. 🙂 I am already making my list of “Things I wish I would have brought” and it is odd since Liverpool is in a developed country–England. I wish I would have brought soap, a reusable grocery bag, (I had it packed and removed it to add another item), bags to collect trash, and toilet paper. This experience reminds me of my Peace Corps days. I had no helping hands in the Peace Corps. I have not found the laundrette yet, however I did bring laundry detergent with me. I already miss the “magic laundry basket” we had in Bangladesh. So what was the first day of school really like? It was very long and difficult to sit from 0830 to 5pm. As I suspected most of the students in the class are young nurses with less than five years of experience as a nurse. Many nurses are under 30 years old. We used the clickers and the quiz to help learn info about the group as well as answers to questions on parasites. The smallest group of nurses is the nurses over 40 years old. I am one of the 5 oldest nurses in the class. The country with the largest group of students is Canada especially Vancouver and Alberta. There are no nurses from any African country or Southeast Asia. We have been divided up into 8 groups to do our group projects and lab assignments. We were assigned based on multiple factors including gender, country of origin, international experience, and age diversity. In my group there is one young man from Norway, two young women from Vancouver, two from the U.S. (including me–the other woman is a young PhD student from Emory University), one woman from England–one hour away from Liverpool, and a woman from Scotland. The makeup of the students is one of the most interesting facets of this course. I am surprised that I remember a lot of the information that was covered today in class–intro to helminth (worms) and child malnutrition. My overseas experience has helped to reduce some of my fears about being a student in tropical nursing. The marks on my pre-course assignment were encouraging. During the tour of the School of Tropical Medicine we saw the parasitology lab, the research lab for the study of venomous snakes, and of course the library. Next week we go to the parasitology lab and the snake lab. We will be looking for parasites in various body fluids and we will find actual parasites!   Tomorrow is HIV, more child health and STI’s. Now back to flash cards and reading my notes from today and for tomorrow. I probably will not come home with an accent, however I will have a few British phrases.