35 days to go!

We had our fifth class meeting yesterday and today – only 35 days to go!!!! It’s getting real close! Are we prepared enough?!

Yesterday’s class was special because we Skyped with Chisomo (in Ohio) – it was great to see her and get her perspective and I hope the students appreciated it as much as I did! Here is the group waiting to start Skyping….

The student presentations this year have been a great addition to the class and they have been pretty awesome presentations!

Also yesterday we received some supplies for the program from Julie at Gordon Stowe – thanks Julie for sending us otoscope specula, OAE and tympanogram tips and probe tubes!! We really appreciate it!!!

Team shirts and Tse scholars

This week’s news includes two important events! 🙂

On Wednesday was the Tse Scholars reception. THREE of our Zambia students were selected to receive the Tse scholarship to help offset the costs of the Zambia program for them – congratulations to Alyssa, Rachel and Amanda!!!

 

And thanks to the generosity of Dr. and Mrs. Tse!! Dr. Tse spoke about why he gives these scholarships – with the hope of having more American students go abroad and for there to be peace in the world as we better understand each other!!

Then on Thursday we had our 4th class meeting and the most exciting event (besides playing two truths and a lie and learning more fun facts about each other) was that we got our team Zambia 2014 shirts! They are awesome!! Thanks to Katie and Jessica for working on getting them for the team! And to Dawn who turns out to be a pretty good photographer and works late and was therefore available to take our team photos!

 

So much good news!!!!

So much has been happening these past three weeks and I haven’t had time to write about it. So here’s an update:

The program continues to be on track with the itinerary slowly taking shape; we have our flight itinerary now and are continuing to work on the daily schedule while in Zambia…

We received a wonderful donation of hearing aids and batteries for the program from Phonak: A big THANK YOU to all who helped with that contribution!

Class # 3 was great with three very informative student presentations on the history of Zambia, Clubfoot and Beit Cure Hospital and PCOE.

The annual convention of the Indiana Speech-Language-Hearing Association was this past week and our presentation on the Zambia program was a huge success! Thanks to Megan, Erikka, Jill and Mel for being the student panelists in that presentation. Their comments were very insightful! Thanks to them!! (Waiting on photo to come….)

And even more good news was received right around convention days:

1) Erikka and Emily will have poster presentations about the SLHS in Zambia 2013 program at the 2nd Annual Academic Community Engagement Poster session on April 15-16

2) Megan’s abstract was accepted and she will have an article published in the Purdue Service Learning Journal

3) Erikka’s photo won 3rd place in the Purdue Study Abroad Photo Contest!! Congratulations to all! 🙂

And yay – I think we have now collected ALL the forms we need from the students – whew!! 🙂

Coming up this week: I am doing an “interview” about the program to be posted on a “service-learning you tube channel” I believe!!! More about that in my next post 🙂