Social work

Social work
HUMN 8110 Advance d Social Work Theory and Practice Week 1 – Social Work Issues (ASW) AJIA MEUX: I am leaving for Belize tomorrow. It is June 18th. My plane leaves tomorrow at 6:00 in the morning. So I’m just trying to make sense of the mess, start getting packing — start getting packing — start packing so that I can leave. I’m really ready to go. I am burned out. This semester burned me out as a social worker. It’s really hard to do clinical work with people who don’t want to do clinical work. My students are sent to me, and they don’t want to be there. So it gets frustrating. So my last week at work, we didn’t do much clinical work. We were doing some other stuff in here. I also have a part -time job where I did some contract work and had to work t his week for about three days. So I’m just ready to go and clear my mind. I haven’t done violence work in a really long time, and that’s my passion, domestic violence and sexual assault. And so I’m excited to get back to doing violence work. When I found out I was going to be a 10 -month employee at Building for the Future Academy — they changed my contract from 12 months to 10 months — I said, “Oh, I’m going someplace next summer. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m going someplace.” And I started lookin g at programs in about November. I started applying for programs in I think January or February. I got accepted to three. I found it on idealist.org. It was a volunteer opportunity. I initially applied for one in the Dominican Republic working as a — run ning a children’s camp. And then I applied to another one in Bolivia at a domestic violence agency. And then I of course applied to Mary Open Doors. But I don’t know what it was about Mary Open Doors. It was something about it. Maybe it was the volunteer coordinator, who was just really engaged. He sent me the job descriptions of all the things that we needed. And because of my experience in victim services, they were really eager to have me. And it was probably the most costly of all the three. It was $1 ,800 a month, and I wanted to stay for six weeks, so a month and a half. So my total was $2,500. But I was ready. I was like, I need to — I want to go there. I don’t know what it was, but I said, I want to go and work at that particular agency. And so I ra ised the money to go within about two -and -a-half months, three months. I raised almost $3,000. And yeah, so I’m excited to go. So this was the end of my first 24 hours in Belize. And it was a good 24 hours. This morning, I went to Downtown San Ignacio a nd bought a couple of things for my room and found out that the price of things in Belize are ridiculous; $37.50 for a set of towels. I talked her down, so she gave it to me for BZD 30, which was $15. It was a nice day. It was a good day. It was warm and h umid and crazy hot. I came home, and my host family is amazing. They are absolutely amazing. I ate four meals today, all authentic Belizean food, beans and rice and a little burrito. Tonight I had pork, curried pork — it was like a stew with potatoes — an d homemade tortillas. I learned a lot about Belizean culture. I learned that they’re pretty poor here. I think Belize has been romanticized so much. Everybody was so excited about me coming, “I’m going to have such a great time, you’re going to Belize, oh my gosh.” Well, I’m inland, and I’m in the country, and it is not like everybody thinks it is. The other thing that I learned about Belizean folks is that they build their own houses. They make everything that it takes to build a house. The house that I live in, the man built it. This is a sturdy house. This is a big house. I saw them actually making, from hand, cinder blocks. I saw them with a machine making cinder blocks. They make everything here. I had a very interesting discussion with a gentleman who ran for public office. And he was talking about how the United States government supports the corruption of the Belizean government. He used the example that if you see a child who is hungry and their parent is drinking and on drugs, how do you help th at child by giving the parent $500? That is what it is like, the US government trying to help the people of Belize, that the children represent the people of Belize, the parent represents the political figure. And I thought that was a really interesting ex ample. He said that the people are hurting and that the politicians are corrupt here, which is going to make for a very interesting six weeks as I work in the field of domestic violence trying not only help survivors, but help the organization by putting processes in place, doing trainings around social work code of ethics and things like that, how does my work — like how does it work alongside a government that’s corrupt? You can’t do this work in isolation, and you have to have the support of everybody. So it’s just going to make an interesting six weeks. © Laureate Education, Inc.