Nampong oh ah ah!

On Monday we packed our bags and left the beautiful, sunny Phuket for Nampong, Thailand! It was hard leaving my host family in Phuket because I felt like I really got the opportunity to connect with them and I promised myself that some day I will travel back to Phuket to see them again!! From Phuket we had about a 15 hour trip to Nampong. During our travels, our flight to Bangkok was delayed and so we ended up arriving at Nampong around 11:30pm... Because we were so late our host family couldn't pick us up and so we ended up staying the night in a meditation room at a Monastary. We slept on bamboo mats on a tile floor. It was quite the experience.
Tuesday we started our CI and I was assigned to one of the hospitals in Nampong. This was absolutely INCREDIBLE because we were given a tour of the hospital and also got to speak with the head physician and I learned so many things about the main illnesses that affect the people in the Nampong area and it was also great to see how general hospital care here differed from hospital care in the U.S.A. Also, while I was there we got to color and play games with some of the children and gave them bed baths as well!! The entire experience was really great and it showed me how much passion I do have for health care. Also, during lunch Wiebke and I had a radio interview about UWP and I can now officially say that I was on the radio in Thailand!! It was also a good prep for my advance work in Sweden coming up and I hope it got all of the first time jitters out of the way.
Today was our 2nd CI day and I spent it painting a building at a boarding school for under privileged young boys. We painted an entire building inside and out and it felt great to accomplish so much for the school in just one day. I feel like every CI I do I find some sort of lesson that I wasn't expecting and I really appreciate the "ah ha!" moments that I have when I realize the lesson in front of me. After CI today we got together as a cast and discussed the issue of human rights. This was a very interesting topic for our cast and we had many different opinions which was great. I think that this was one of our harder education periods for our cast, but it was so good to have because it just affirmed the fact that UWP is hard and that you learn new things in very different ways and nothing is ever really spelled out for you because it is all about building your own opinion and having proper information to be able to defend your position. I still am unsure about some things concerning human rights, so I don't know if I have a definite opinion yet, but it is something I will continue to work on over the next couple days. So that is all for now! More next time!!