The trainings

I thought I'd talk about the trainings we had to do before flying to the Philippines and the trainings before being out into our work placements.

Before heading to the Philippines, we attended to Leicester's University to do our training there. Whilst leaving Belfast airport, I stupidly left my suitcase at the security check up point (do not ask how) I had to spend the long weekend, borrowing my friend's clothes (thank you, Chelsea!) haha.

Throughout the weekend, we learnt about the Philippines's culture, how hard it would be being away from home, our fears and hopes, the host home, what to expect from being a volunteer, the code of conduct, the rules, we had to solve the dilemmas, and discussed what to do in possible situations with 5 different approaches which were: accommodate, compromise, control, avoid or problem solving, foods, counterpart - what to expect from them and how to deal with any type of problems with them and to put stuff like - CAD (community action day)- with the community, ACD (active citizenship days)- the volunteers only- to find out more about the Philippines, or if we have a particular topic we would like to know more about, we use one of the ten ACD to take that opportunity, KAP1,2,3 surveys, host home, placement leave host home, debrief, MPR (mid phrase review) etc in to columns of 'pre-placement', 'in placement' and 'post-placement' - I hope that makes sense? If not, please do comment!

We also talked about our idea of 'development' - I believe that in order for development to happen, you would need education first- I'll try and summarise it by doing a flowchart but horizontally!

Education-work-money-family-money to support family (food, shelter and education)-children can learn by that money from that job- then the children can succeed in having jobs from that education that the parents paid for- with the money they earned from that job- and they have that job because they had education. Therefore that kind of development is sustainable!

We then had a discussion about medical care, our health and what medicines to bring, and how to clean such wounds, how to prevent HIV and AIDS. The usual lectures you'd get from school but with more depth- I'm not going to bore you with all that details, don't worry! ;) lol!

We then had more training in the Philippines, before the work placement. The training was basically a recap of what we did in Leicester with a few more extra things we needed to know about the Philippines. As in the training we had in the UK, it was more general, and not 100% focused on the Philippines.

The interpreters did a lecture about interpreting as in the Philippines, interpreters are not as well trained as the UK interpreters are. So they went through the basics rules of interpreting- such as they are not allowed to drop in their own opinions, they have to translate everything the speaker/signer had said, they have to keep everything confidential and they talked about the definition of being
professional and their boundaries etc.

We were also informed of the different work placements that we would be doing. I'm going to be honest, I do not remember all of it (guilty!) but I will try and find out information about all of the work placement. I'm gonna tell you what I can remember and when it have find out all of the work placements, I will update this blog and inform you!

-GVSP - Gualandi Volunteers Service Programme - I will be discussing about this in my next blog.
-Basak Elementary School- teaching the Deaf children in a Deaf unit.
-First High School for the Hearing impaired, teaching the Deaf, Maths, Art and English etc.
- Zapatera School - teaching the Deaf, Maths, Art and English etc.
-AVRC (Area Vocational Rehabilitation Centre) - my work placement - I'm starting there tomorrow and I'm very excited! I will be talking about this tomorrow, because I would know more about this
project by tomorrow. Basically, I will be teaching life skills to isolated Deaf people who doesn't have a job.
-DSWD- Department of social and welfare development.
-Haven - teaching women who were abused.

I will be talking more about these placements once I know more about those!

I will update this blog- so keep an eye on this one! I will inform you when this has been updated by Facebook!
Bye for now! :)