Internship at BRIJDER VERSLAVINGZORG, an inpatient addiction care facility in Haarlem, North Holland.
HOURLY LOG
07/21/2014 -- 9:00-17:00 (8 hrs) 07/22/2014 -- 9:00-17:00 (8 hrs) 07/23/2014 -- 9:00-17:00 (8 hrs) Total: 24 hrs. WEEKLY JOURNAL (I only spent one week here, forgive me.)
How would I describe my experience here? Well, not as stressful as I thought it would be. I'm surprised at how comfortable I feel here -- enough to sit behind my supervisor's desk and type this while she's in a meeting (with permission, of course). I'm assisting one of my uncle's colleagues, Pia, who is primarily responsible for nutrition/food and supply inventory in an addiction/detox center in a hospital. As I'm here for a full work day, I get to see almost all aspects of the job, from morning meetings to lunch to the daily badminton games. For the most part, the job consists of walking around. A lot. While most employees work either on the first or the second floor exclusively, Pia is responsible for the supplies on both floors, so we are constantly going up and down the stairs, or through the elevator with carts of frozen food. The place is a maze; finding your way around is challenging to say the least, much more so when trying to navigate a cart full of food and cleaning supplies through small halls. Everything here feels smaller somehow, and although I'm not an especially large person, I am so used to America and everything being bigger that I constantly run into things or bump into them. I think people here think I'm clumsy. HOURLY LOG
(i'll put this in in like 2 seconds my log is at home pce) |
CLOSING REPORT
This internship was a lot less eventful than I had imagined. Of course, that isn't to say that it wasn't eventful, but working with drug and/or alcohol addicts, I had expected more 'drama', so to speak. I was refreshingly surprised, and suppose that on some level, I've personally seen the falsehood in the social stigma surrounding addicts -- while of course there were more difficult patients, most of the people I met were polite, thoughtful people. I had also on some level expected it to be very serious, and very stiff, somehow. Instead, what I found was a very relaxed (though still efficient) work environment. Many of the doctors eat lunch together in the hospital cafeteria, and afterwards play badminton until their lunch break is over, they stop in the halls for a moment to catch up, etc. The biggest obstacle of this internship is the language barrier. Though most people here speak English reasonably well, it's certainly not fluent, and while my Dutch is usually very good, there are often moments where I forget words or struggle for the right syntax. Especially in a hospital, where many of the words thrown around are medical jargon, and are also thrown around rather fast, it's easy to get confused and totally lost, and tempting to just nod and smile rather than ask what it means and risk looking stupid. Thankfully, resisting this temptation isn't difficult if you probably already look stupid. A little more stupid never hurt anyone. The second biggest obstacle was standing up early. Like, 6 AM early. Most of what I did probably fell under ''organization'' and ''communication'', obviously invaluable life skills that enable me to stock shelves and be offered an unreasonable amount of coffee. (I'm kidding.) Although there was a lot of shelf-stocking involved, mostly what I did was running errands, essentially, from the first floor freezer room to the second floor kitchen to the first floor staff room to the first floor kitchen, and then back to the freezer room before going to the second floor staff room. A big portion of the day is devoted to organizing food and preparing for meals, but we also have to check in with the dagleider (dayleader), or the patient responsible for organizing the clean-up that day, and making sure everything is as it should be. Laundry bags, linens, towels, and cleaning supplies need to be stocked, rooms need to be checked to ensure they're clean for the next patient, and quite a lot of paperwork needs to be done. |