I do it for the love....

No one ever goes into teaching for the money.  Whether you work in K-12, college, or staff education, you will never get paid for the extra time you take with a student, or the hours you pour over lesson plans and activities to make sure your students have the best learning experience.  But we do it for the love- to help our students become successful people, professionals, and colleagues.  I can always feel this love and energy whenever I am in a room of educators, which is what I felt today when I attended a tutor (faculty) capacity building workshop.  Dr. Mina and I led discussions/lectures/workshops with faculty from the Georgetown school of Nursing, New Amsterdam School of Nursing, Ministry of Health/Health Sciences Education branch, and Georgetown Public Hospital.  In total we had 25 attendees who engaged in topics dealing with teaching strategies in the classroom, developing instructional guides, and clinical teaching.  You could feel the collective brainstorming happening in the room, along with the collective frustration from the lack of accreditation of the schools of nursing, which makes it difficult for them to have a standardized curriculum and evaluation.

Mina leading a class session

Helping the tutors develop instructional guides

An overview of the tutors working during the session

The afternoon led to a meeting about the accreditation of our Neonatal Intensive Care Nurse program.  The meeting held officials from the Ministry of Health, including the honorable Minister of Health Dr. Bheri Ramsaran, the Chief Medical Officer Dr. Sham Persaud, the Chief Nursing Officer Nurse Barker, and Medex Benn (title meaning "nurse practitioner") who is in charge of Health Sciences Education along with Heads of the National Accreditation Council for Nursing and the Permanent Secretary of the Public Service Ministry, Mr. Alli (they govern all of the nurses in hospitals beside the private sector/GPHC such as our nurses returning to Linden, Suddie, New Amsterdam, and West Demarara).  The goal for Guyana Help the Kids is to help transition our programs over to the government of Guyana by the end of our funding on December 31, 2016. One way to do this is to get our program accredited and recognized by the government as a nursing specialty and to find a home for the program so that the education of NICU nurses can continue.  We approached this subject when I was there in August, and we've had one follow up meeting at the end of August with major proposal and job description/definition written and sent.  Today was the follow up meeting with all the major players to see how best to approach this task.  What we left with was that the Nursing Council felt the best way was to approach the University of Guyana (UG) so the program would have a little more control, rigor, and ability to reach a wider audience (their hope is that nurses from all over the Caribbean would come to Guyana to enroll in the program).  I left with a meeting appointment with the Director of Health Sciences Education at UG for tomorrow afternoon, with Dr. Mina facilitating since I am scheduled to meet with the ward nurses to provide more clinical education around the same time.  I'm hoping we get a better response tomorrow than I did when I approached UG in March, where they wouldn't consider housing the program unless it was an additional certification after students completed their Bachelor's degree (another 2 years before they could even enroll in our program).  With the ministry on our side (Dr. Sham and Medex Benn are facilitating) and the call for the meeting coming from Dr. Bheri, I'm looking forward to a partnership with UG, which was always my goal from the beginning.  High hopes!!!

Statue of "Cuffy" (also spelled Coffey or Kofi), a national hero of Guyana, who was a west-african who led a slave revolt in the Dutch colony of Berbice in 1763.  The statue can be seen from the waiting room at the Ministry of Health

As with all meetings with the ministry, a cold beer is always in order at the end, so Mina invited me to hang out with her family at their hotel where I was served leftovers from their family lunch at Rish's grandparents (roti with duck curry, cook up (rice, veggies, and black-eyed peas), fried snapper and roasted chicken).  As always, I practically licked the plate :)  They also had made friends with the  hotel owner, who cooked crab curry.  First time I used my teeth to crack open the shell, and again, the curry was amazing.   The party continued with another visit to the wedding house, where the family was celebrating the bride's return with lots of meat and alcohol.  I was greeted by hugs and a huge plate of food, again as if I'd know them my entire life.  I even earned a dinner invitation for later this week, with the man of the house saying how grateful he is that people come to his country, which he loves, to help his people, and because of this would do anything he can to help me feel welcome.  I, however, always feel that I am the lucky one, the blessed one, who has been welcomed into this community of people and allowed to share a little knowledge and hope. Like I say, I do it for the love...

Crab curry