Last week I volunteered at the hospital in Hualien. There were two main areas in which I worked:
1) helping the JPN (basically a nurse’s assistant, I believe) on the surgery recovery ward;
2) joining other volunteers in singing religious songs to patients who opted to be serenaded to
On the surgery ward, I helped:
a) change patients’ bedding, clothing, etc.
b) wash hair, give a sponge (or rather a washcloth) bath
c) transfer patients to stretchers, wheelchairs, or this cool scale contraption
d) “da niao” which means emptying catheter bags and measuring urine
e) filling alcohol and iodine containers
As for the singing… Well, we’ll just say I’d never done so much lip-syncing before in my life. The majority of songs, we sang in Taiwanese—we sang in the choice language of each patient. Even when we sang in Mandarin, I could only read every other character (gotta get back to the books). The rest, I could elaborate on more another time. But I will say that, given the choice between singing gospel in Taiwanese, Mandarin, Hakka, or miscellaneous other aboriginal languages, I CHOOSE HAKKA. Because the lyrics to these songs were written out in the English alphabet, because no other volunteer could speak it either.
I just smiled and moved my lips, as my volunteer friend kept place on the sheet music for me. She knew that I could not speak a word of Taiwanese, but I guess she thought I might eventually be able to sound out the words. Ha ha!
;)
For those who don’t know, characters are learned by memorization. Taiwanese uses the same characters as Mandarin, but assigns them different sounds and meanings. (Okay, you can laugh now!)
1) helping the JPN (basically a nurse’s assistant, I believe) on the surgery recovery ward;
2) joining other volunteers in singing religious songs to patients who opted to be serenaded to
On the surgery ward, I helped:
a) change patients’ bedding, clothing, etc.
b) wash hair, give a sponge (or rather a washcloth) bath
c) transfer patients to stretchers, wheelchairs, or this cool scale contraption
d) “da niao” which means emptying catheter bags and measuring urine
e) filling alcohol and iodine containers
As for the singing… Well, we’ll just say I’d never done so much lip-syncing before in my life. The majority of songs, we sang in Taiwanese—we sang in the choice language of each patient. Even when we sang in Mandarin, I could only read every other character (gotta get back to the books). The rest, I could elaborate on more another time. But I will say that, given the choice between singing gospel in Taiwanese, Mandarin, Hakka, or miscellaneous other aboriginal languages, I CHOOSE HAKKA. Because the lyrics to these songs were written out in the English alphabet, because no other volunteer could speak it either.
I just smiled and moved my lips, as my volunteer friend kept place on the sheet music for me. She knew that I could not speak a word of Taiwanese, but I guess she thought I might eventually be able to sound out the words. Ha ha!
;)
For those who don’t know, characters are learned by memorization. Taiwanese uses the same characters as Mandarin, but assigns them different sounds and meanings. (Okay, you can laugh now!)
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