I may have blinked and it’s September, but I’ve been all for these last few months in Townsville. Not to be the person that talks about the weather but I’m going to because it’s been positively delightful; we go from mid-teens to mid/high twenties (degrees Celsius) which means going about my day without my plans revolving around aircon availability and whether my shirt is now sticking to me. It’s the dream, really.
B I G G E R P I C T U R E
In non-weather related news, and as you can probably imagine, a global pandemic has changed a few things that happen around our base. We have smaller training schools, zoom meetings are a frequent occurrence, hand sanitiser is everywhere and there’s social distance markers on the floor anywhere a line forms (the enforced personal space is something I’ve actually rather enjoyed). Our ship is also back in Townsville, and has been for some time, with outreaches in PNG suspended for the rest of 2020 (that update here).
When I ask myself the question of what we’re up to in the midst of all this, the answer sometimes surprises me as it’s quite a bit. While my ideas in coming here were medical-ship focused, there are so many other things people from our base are involved in; to name a few we have VET (Vocational Education and Training) students on campus, a radio station, and we just opened a café on an external site.
W H A T I ‘ V E B E E N U P T O
I’m now an 8-5, Monday to Friday desk dweller. Well, mostly.
Of the last six-ish months, I’ve spent three of them full time in the Medical Training Team, and this past quarter I’ve done half days at my desk and half days in Property Development.
M E D I C A L T R A I N I N G T E A M
As the name suggests, our Medical Training Team focusses on medical/health related training and education. This can be for our own clinic leaders, local PNG health workers we work alongside in PNG, and the people we’re serving while over there. This leads to a variety of different projects, and I’ve predominantly worked on four these past few months.
Clinic leader training packages: These are the online training packages available to staff before they go and lead a clinic on the ship in PNG. As our base rolled over to a new online learning platform earlier this year, we began the process of updating, redeveloping and reenvisioning this training.
Flip charts: While in PNG, we use flipcharts in our clinics for health education and promotion, on everything from TB and malaria, through to how to brush your teeth and family planning. With a crash course in Adobe InDesign I got to piggy-backed on someone else’s project of getting some of these charts into Tok Pisin (one of PNG’s national languages) and putting them into the chart templates. There’s a fair bit of excitement around these from people who’ve used them, so it was cool/is cool to be involved in.
Ophthalmology program review: I sidestepped into our Monitoring and Evaluation team to be part of an internal review of our ophthalmology program, spearheaded by a past YWAM Townsville DTS student who is now a medical student in the states completing a student-ship. This was my favourite part of these past few months, and I’m excited to see what comes next from this.
Certificate IV: We’re putting a new medical related Certificate IV on training scope so I’ve been writing assessment material for a couple of units.
Our office also processes medical donations we receive for ship related things as even when the ship is back in Townsville, ship stuff never really does stop.
P R O P E R T Y D E V E L O P M E N T
The property development team is generally a lot of fun, and often a nice break from being behind a desk all day. These past few months we’ve finished off five new units on our main campus, some of the team did our café fit-out, and we’ve done a library reno. Hopefully I can track down a few ‘before and after photos’ at some stage, but I mostly have ‘somewhere in the middle’ shots like those below.
So, that’s a brief update about what I’m up to and what’s going on in my neck of the woods. How are things going for you?
PS: If you have any questions for me about what I’m up to or what I have been up to please reach out – I’d love to chat with you!