Our Introduction at the YMCA

We are doing a couple of projects while we are down here and one of them involves working at the local YMCA in Freeport. The YMCA here hosts summer camps for children that cost $50 per week. They split the kids up into groups and for our first day, I ended up working with the 5 year olds. We spent this day actually being camp counselors so we could get an idea of what the whole day there looks like.

Our main project for the YMCA is teaching an afternoon class for health promotion to the kids. This first day, we spent out class time doing a powerpoint on UVA, Charlottesville and information about us so the kids could get to know us. We started by showing them a map of the US and the Bahamas and asking if they knew what it was. When asked how we got from Virginia all the way down to Grand Bahama Island, the 5 year olds responded with, "You SWAM here!!!". Um, not quite kids...We then showed them pictures of the mountains in Charlottesville. We said, "Do the Bahamas have mountains?" Their response was of course YES!! Um, again, no kids not really....We had some interesting responses about whether it snows in the Bahamas as well.

The best part of our conversation was definitely the part where we talked to them about what nurses are and why they are important. Here are some responses we got:
- Nurses help people
- Nurses make moms have babies
- Nurses help doctors and do what doctors say to do
- Nurses give oxygen so people can breath (we were quite impressed with this one! The child probably had a sick adult in the hospital or something??)
- Nurses give you shots

And our favorite was a little boy who stood up during this answer session and said:
"Veterinarians take care of animals!!"    Um.....thank you that also is true!

While we were all four standing up there, we asked the question "Can BOYS be nurses??" The 5 year olds all said yes and then every single child said they wanted to be a nurse. When we did this session again with the 7-11 year old group, we had distinct answers about how boys could NOT be nurses (even though Steve was standing right up there in front of them) and there were only a few children who said they would want to be a nurse. Nursing here has the stigma that this profession is all about doing what doctors say and cleaning up bedpans. The nurses still wear all white dresses and stockings to work and have little autonomy. Evidence based practice is not a priority here and nurses are very much subordinate to doctors.