My Indang RHU Immersion Experience: Day 8 - Continuing the Grind

Today, since our RHU duty was suspended once more, us first-years spent the early portion of the day printing the health teaching materials that we are going to use to teach the communities in Barangays Guyam Malaki and Guyam Munti about the topics of deworming, the first 1000 days, dengue and its prevention, as well as family planning. Since the second-years assigned with the designing of the materials gave us the go signal for printing the tarpaulins and pamphlets, me and three other first-years who lived near the Cavite State University - Indang campus went to print it in a printing shop near the university. Though the storm was still occurring, we managed to meet up during a time where it temporarily stopped. For the payment for the printing, our immersion group leader Richard said that some of the second-years lent 2500 pesos so that we have money to use immediately for our expenses, and that all of us as a whole will evenly split the final bill spent for everything once the immersion program was over. The pamphlets were printed rather quickly, though we had them be printed with no color to keep things in line with the budget. The tarpaulins though were to be collected the morning of Thursday since the Guyam Munti health teaching was rescheduled to that day. We then split the pamphlets among the four of us, so that we can work on folding and cutting them as needed on our own time. Initially, I expected my fellow first-year students to be feeling quite down with low energy, but I was surprised to see them rather invigorated even with the current events. Their general sentiment was that in a way, these suspensions gave us some time to work on our reports and prepare better for our health teachings and surveys. I'll admit that they put me in a working mood too, and I learned that you need to find ways to keep your head up and stay productive, especially as a future doctor who might be put in situations like the COVID pandemic where there is surely a prevailing negative sentiment looming in the air. 

 

Sadly, I was not able to attend an online alignment meeting for us assigned to the Indang RHU along with our supervisors, Dr. Richard, and Dr. Annie, due to personal matters, but since they recorded the minutes of the meeting, I was able to get aligned with our goals. For the health teaching on Guyam Munti, we already had a finalized program flow. Due to schedule lapses however, the Guyam Malaki health teaching will be conducted on the RHU instead. For the complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) survey, it seemed that most of us didn't have anyone surveyed yet so our leader Richard had tried to ask if it was okay to conduct the survey through social media, though we assumed that this wasn't getting approved. Updates were provided on the community profiling and needs assessment written report, as well as to the documentation of the entire summer immersion, where we they decided that there will be an interview section on the final video output where we'll be saying one-liners or phrases. They wrapped up the meeting by listing the outputs that we needed to prepare this week: the local health system output, presentation, and video; and the CAM presentation. Refreshed by the organized nature of the meeting which managed to make our goals clear, I ended the day motivated to work on the other tasks ahead of me so we'll be ready when the time comes to get back to the RHU and submit these outputs.