A Thousand Wounds and a Free Lunch

The next stop for our school nursing was Hermosa, Bataan. Hermosa is largely a rural town. Most of the people are either farmers or fishermen in huge fishponds that line the Manila Bay.

Compare to the one we had last week, the school where we attended this time is smaller. There is no two-story buildings and concrete pavement. The school is built face to face to a ricefield that extends as far as the road goes.

Last week we had a fish bowl draw for our health teaching and I got to teach Proper Nutrition, Loren picked Proper Hygiene, Alex Dengue while Angelo, to his dismay, picked Renal Disease. All of us only prepared the night before although Angelo was really perplexed on how to teach Renal Diseases to children. Of course he can’t talk about the anatomy of Renal system nor the pathophysiology of kidney stone. I even told him not to mention that most kidney stones are made up of Calcium or the children won’t believe me if I tell them that milk is good.

Before the Health Teaching, while the kids are having their recess, we decided to conduct a room to room visit to clean the children’s wounds. Unlike the kids from the school last week who showed us healed scars when asked if they have cuts or laceration, the kids in this school know perfectly well that we are asking for fresh wounds. I handled all types of wounds in one section alone, there were rare cases of eczema, while scabies was the most common.

After cleaning the children’s wounds, we prepared for our Health teaching, A teacher heard me reciting a Tagalog Nursery rhyme that I plan to show the kids. I do not remember all the verses, but she helped me by reciting some of the lines that she heard being recited by the Grade One Students (she teaches Grade 5 and 6), she said that she was able to memorize some of the lines after hearing it for 400 gazillion times everyday. The rhyme was;

Saging at papaya

pagkaing pampaganda.

Uminom ka ng Gatas, kumain ka ng gulay

nang ang katawa’y lumakas.

Dalanghitang makatas, galing Batangas

Sa ubo’t halinghing mainam na lunas.

This was not exactly the nursery rhyme that I learned in Kindergarten. It was a different variation, though i really enjoyed the Dalanghita line. I added 6 more lines incorporating the GO, GLOW and GROW diet.

After a few hours, we finally had our health teaching, and it was great. It was cool seeing the little children listen to us. They even replied when we asked them some questions. Of course there were still the noisy ones, mostly at the back, but the kids were really bright and we know that they enjoyed it. Some even remembered my name, calling me Kuya Richmond.

Everything that day was perfect. We even have a free snack before the health teaching, we each had a bowl full of lugaw with huge hard boiled egg and a BJ, buko juice. For our lunch, free again of course, pinakbet and tortang dilis. We ate with the principal.