Oh man, if ten years ago someone would have told me I would be the minority in many of my daily situations, I would have laughed in their face. Diversity was not a big part of my life, almost everyone I knew was white, raised Christian, and had two parents that had been married for their whole life :) How things have changed!
First, lets talk about my situation at Share the Care. I have one boss who is a Jewish Canadian gay man, an ex boss who was a lesbian Jew from New York, mainly 40+ year old women coworkers, and an office of primarily hispanic and Phillipino Americans (I think there are three blonde heads out of over 100 in our department :). At first some of my coworkers seemed so 'Out there', but now I know so much about all of them and like them all so much and it just makes you learn that you have more in common with people who are "different" than you than you think.
When I started my second job, they told me it was primarily all the same type of patients-lots of low income hispanic women, lots of single mothers, lots of teenagers, most of them eat the same things, very straight forward and easy. "Not a problem," I thought. Nothing I can't handle.
Flash forward to yesterday and diversity/my learning experiences were at a peak. Of 8 patients scheduled 5 show up.
Patient 1: recovering cocaine addict
Patient 2: Spanish speaking women with 4 year old son who translates for me
Patient 3: women who moved from China 2 weeks ago and relies on electronic translator
Patient 4: Ethiopian woman with gestational diabetes
Patient 5: 89 pound Vietnamese woman with very little English vocab.
Needless to say it was sort of stressful, pretty confusing, language barriers were totally there, but all in all, they were a great group of patients who were really trying hard to do good for their baby. In both of my jobs I'm learning a lot about different types of people, which I really like. Even though my coworkers and patients are different than me, I can find things I have in common with almost all of them and try now more than ever never to judge a book by its cover.
On another note, today we had our annual workshop and I did a fun cooking demo with 100 preschool teachers. We hade lots of cute snacks that are healthy. Here are a few picts:
I guess that just takes you all into the a few days in the life of a dietitian in San Diego :)
1 comment:
cute snacks. glad you're enjoying your new job, as stressful as it may be. see you in a little over a week.
how'd househunting go?
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