Week 2:
Phu My Orphanage and Medical Clinic

June 28, 2014

This week was my first full week at the Clinic.  I have developed a schedule for every day of the week, I try to work with the same children on the particular areas that they are most lacking.  For instance, upon arrival I work with a child on helping develop his ability to walk.  He has the desire to walk, but just not the coordination or muscular development to do so.  So I assist him by doing some stretches and exercises to help develop his legs, and then I help him balance as he tries to walk.  There is another child who has Autism, and avoids social contact.  I have been working with him on developing proper social interactions, such as eye contact and responding when being spoken to.

I have also worked with several smaller children on developing a self-sufficient eating style and being able to feed ones self.  This is definitely a messy process.  I have found out that it is common for Vietnamese parents to spoon feed their children, even if the child is capable of feeding on their own.  This makes it difficult to teach the children to eat on their own, as they only need to do so once a day rather than every single time they want to eat.  It would be best to have a more regular pattern of reinforcement for these behavior (walking, good social interaction and self-feeding)  as I learned in several of my psychology courses that the more frequent the behavior and the more frequent the reward the better the individual will learn the behavior.  Yet it is hard to have enough frequency as there are nearly 25 children to work with, and only a few staff to take care of them.  So it may take a while for these new behavior to develop.

Every afternoon the staff prepares an activity, such activities include painting, drawing, coloring, making masks, and other arts and crafts.  These are great for the children as they are therapeutic, and can help the children relax.  They also work on the child’s creativity, problem solving and fine motor skills when they work with pens, or a paint brush.  It is also a good time to promote proper social interactions as these are often done in a group setting.  On Wednesday I had the opportunity to work with the Speech Therapist, I helped her transcribe her patient files into English.  The reasoning for translating the files was to help the Hospital get more money from grants, and also to have files that the English speaking staff could read to better help the children.  After transcribing the files I was allowed to observe her work with several patients.  The therapy itself was pretty straight forward, she would give the the patient a word or phrase to repeat.  She would also give them several exercises to practice the pronunciation of the different tones in the Vietnamese language.

Overall I feel that this has been an extremely successful week, it will take a while to see noticeable results but the work is rewarding.  I have really enjoyed the physical therapy exercises with the children and I am considering ways I could incorporate that into my future career.  I feel that in some situations Psychology and Physical therapy would work well together.