This week started with Dr. Susan McDowell joining us for a second year in a row. Dr. McDowell is an Orthopedic resident from Indiana University and has already started sharing her valuable skills with the Barefoot Dr. Students. She had the day off on Tues. so she could go see one of the “model villages” here in Thailand. The visit to this primitive village gave her a better understanding of what it is like where the students come from. The village she saw, however, has many advantages because it is in Thailand and not too far from modern towns.
The students are continuing their presentations on various subjects. Here you see Ester Mai Mai giving an excellent presentation on Rheumatic Fever. She even used visual aids and she made use of the anatomy dummy.
I have been continuing to teach them about germs and how disease is spread. I will make them all germophobic yet.
I have also been teaching them about how to use their books. It dawned on us that they may not have ever been taught how to use things like an index, charts, and vocabulary lists in books. Sure enough, this turned out to be a difficult and valuable subject for them. Something we have been taught from a very young age and take for granted is a new concept to many of them. Of course a few of them have had more formal education and had an easy time with this subject. From the teacher's standpoint, this was an important revelation for us. We had been struggling with why they were not looking things up as we asked them to and why they were having such difficulty finding subjects in the book. Their difficulty following us in the book information turned out to be our error because we did not start with how to use the book. It simply never dawned on us until the end of last week.
Until next time.
Rick
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