Volunteer Diary 4 and 5 - a recap

To say that I have been busy is an understatement. I had the assumption that after my exams had finished I would be graced with time to focus on this blog, to work on my university application and to get ahead in A2 work, along with socialising with my friends and also complete some more work experience. Well it turns out that in doing all of this I have lost track of time and I have only just realised how much I have neglected this blog, and for that I apologise.

So since my last post I have continued with my MOOC on the clinical psychology of children and young adults, and I have learnt so much about the formation of mental illnesses and how complex they are. I also feel as if through this MOOC I have significantly improved my own independent learning skills.

However, my voluntary work is what is continuing to inspire me. Each week I am continuing to strengthen the bonds and friendships I am making with the children, whilst learning more and more about their personal disabilities and challenges, along with getting to know their parents. On Friday we had a special skills ice skating lesson, and as well as improving my own skating ability, I learnt that I have hugely impacted on particular boys life. The boy is one who I looked after on my first week of volunteering and he suffers from dyspraxia. Despite not being paired with him that week, he still insisted on being paired with me, and even left the volunteer who was initially paired with him to skate with me, continuously hugging me and telling me that I am his favourite. Whilst this may just be a phase, I can help but feel almost a sense of accomplishment, if not at least a huge humbling feeling that I have influenced this boy's life so much, that he wants to work with me every week (last week when I was paired with him he danced around the seating area in the ice rink with excitement and shouting "YES I GET TO WORK WITH ELLIE") To see a child respond in that way is extremely inspiring, to know that you alone can improve their mood that significantly proves to me alone why I do this voluntary work. Of course it is not just this boy who inspires me, they all do. Even when we were completing the skills lesson, all of the children joined in, despite many uncomfortable glances at first, they all want to try new things, and they are all willing to do new things.

I feel that through my voluntary work I can see myself growing as a person. Not only do the children that I work with inspire me each week, but so do the incredible other volunteers who I have been able to meet along the way. Before I started this voluntary work I had a tendency to be quite shy around new people. Whether shy is the right adjective is debatable, but I was not one to go up to new people at random and create a conversation or friendship, I liked to take a slower approach, but now I have certainly become more outgoing, indefinitely more caring and my communication skills have improved immensely. I have gained a lot from my voluntary work, but maybe more so than anything I am gaining incredible memories,  each week I have the chance to help these children, to improve what may have been an awful week for them, and have a great time at the same time. What more could you want?

Finished with exams!

Yesterday was my last exam, and today I have never felt more liberated and free. As a whole I am happy with my exams, I feel as if the majority went extremely well, but I am disappointed with how my mechanics 1 module in further maths went. I suppose that the problem with exams is that in one way it is the luck of the draw, sometimes the wrong questions come up and it just doesn't go as well as you hoped, which for me happened in my M1 exam, and it is infuriating because I know that I am capable of getting 100% sometimes on my M1 papers, but that day it just all went wrong. Apart from that the rest of my exams went well. It is true what they say though AS is much harder than GCSE.

However, now I am just happy to be done, to have time again that is not taken up revising, time that I will now focus on utilising for both actually having a social life, but also to spend more time on working on this blog, working on my MOOC, reading as many medical related novels as possible and begin researching a topic for the EPQ that I hope to complete this forth coming year.

Volunteer Diary 3 - autism

Most of the children I work with at my voluntary work have mild disabilities, ones that realistically if you did not know where present, you would think were non existent in these children. However, there is one boy who it is quite clear has a much more severe disability, he suffers from severe autism, and this week I was asked to look after him. 

I had never had any experience with autism until today, I had merely read about, so I was excited to  be able to look after this boy and learn more about this devastating disability. From skating with this boy for an hour and a half, it became apparent that I really did not know much about autism, just the basics, but one thing I did notice immediately is that this boy as cliché and basic as it sounds, was in another world of his own. The communication between the two of us was very basic, he would reply yeah to most of my questions, and when he replied no there was often a long pause and no sounded almost aggressive. I also noticed that much of our communication was not through words, but facial expressions, he would skate in front of me and every few minutes would look back and smile to check I was there, he also would pull funny face at me, and if I reciprocated would laugh. 

As well as taking the children ice skating, as volunteers we are responsible for making sure they eat, for most children this is taking them to the cafe and buying chips and chicken nuggets, but this boy came with a backpack full of his food. What was interesting to me was that instead of asking to get off the ice and eat, he would stop at the exit of the rink and just stand there till I asked get off? It was almost as if he was waiting for my permission. 

After the session today I left feeling very reflective, whilst I did feel quite sad that this boy was so oblivious to the world and appeared so confused, I also left feeling satisfied and that I had really made a difference and helped him today, because it was obvious that when he was skating around the ice rink he seemed much calmer and much happier. It made me realise that I no longer do this voluntary work to gain experiences that will help me with a medical degree, but that now I actually do this voluntary work because I genuinely care about the children who come. Over the time I have been volunteering at this charity I have got to know many of the children and they will come up and hug me upon arrival, and even know I am meeting new children every week. For example, this week a boy who I had never looked after before came up to me, shook my hand, told me he was the science genius, and proceeded to explain to me how he would clone a dinosaur, and from the biology lessons I have had on clones I can confirm that what this 9 year old was saying, was in fact true. I suppose what I am trying to say that this voluntary work is something that I love to do, and that each week the children there never cease to amaze me and provide me with new memories, allowing me to finish my week knowing that if all else failed that week, I have improved their day and week, which ultimately is the aim in my opinion.