"normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are"

Hola! This is Kristen blogging from Bon Secours Memorial College of Nursing in Richmond, Virginia. I am a Senior nursing student and will be finished with nursing school in 7 weeks! This is a very exciting trip for me to improve my assessment skills, be immersed in another culture, and see the world of nursing in a different light. There are 11 of us from Bon Secours, 7 nursing students, 2 graduates, and 2 faculty members. We are here until Friday, March 18th. The guesthouse is wonderful, we are very excited to meet people from all over the United States, including two other nursing schools.

I highly reccomend this trip for anyone looking to expand their cultural views and see Dominicans who truly need assistance, whether you are in the medical field or not. We had our first clinical today Los Arroyos and we saw about 160-180 patients. We saw many families, a lot of children. The main illnesses we saw were colds, scabies, fungal infections, GI illnesses, hypertension, and back pain. We have been collecting medications to bring on this trip for about 4 months, and we were able to administer medications to everyone that needed them. We mainly administered antibiotics, hypertensive medications, children's multivitamins, medication for parasites, and analgesics for musculoskeletal pain. The Dominicans were so grateful for our help, often embracing us before leaving the clinic. It was such a gratifying and eye-opening experience. Our spanish is slowly improving, hopefully we will be understanding more by the end of the week! We are very excited to be spending our spring break here, and we look forward to many experiences to come.

"Each of us is here to discover our true selves; that essentially we are spiritual beings who have taken manifestation in physical form; that we're not human beings that have occasional spiritual experiences, that we're spiritual beings that have occasional human experiences"
-Deepak Chopra