Home of Compassion ( Field Placement) - Reflection of last Thursday

Today I went to Home of Compassion with Jancy. She was a little worried that we would not be able to communicate well due to her limited English but it all worked out. We took the bus and arrived to meet Sharif and Yogilam who had taken their motorcycles. Then we walked in and sat at the tables to wait for instructions. We then walked into the secretary’s office where we were given instructions to go to the class for recovering alcoholics. There must have been some miss- communication between the students and the secretary of the organization. I believe the students thought that today they were going to be working with those who were housed by the organization. However, the secretary said that he would only allow them to work with them after they had received training by going to the recovering alcoholics meetings. When they found this out they were not happy.

After meeting with him we went to the first session of the meetings, which focused on decision-making. I only knew this because it was one of the only words written in English on the white board the man was using. The session was given in Tamil except for the prayer at the end and the phrases “seeing the world through my eyes” and “sensation of feeling” which were written on the white board during the session. Sharif was able to translate some of the chanting at the end for me which had to do with making change in their lives. We also attended a second session on stress management where the teacher taught all of us how to meditate to relieve stress. At the close of both sessions we prayed, “God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference.” After eating lunch, we planned a skit to articulate that alcoholism was a disease and promoted that the Home of Compassion was a place they could come to be cured. The students who spoke Tamil came up with the idea of what we should do and gave me the part of a bar tender, part of a door and one of the doctors at the end of the skit. They plan to translate what I say in English into Tamil when we perform it next Thursday.