Today was another excellent day at Shad Dalhousie! We started off our morning in the normal way with two lectures. This mornings topics included psychology and financial planning, both of which were very interesting! Rec time followed and we played ultimate frisbee at a school park just down the road from our residence. It was a super fun game! It has such a fast pace that makes it more challenging! I really enjoyed it! After our lunch break, everyone broke up into their seminars that we chose for this week. Some of these seminars included electronics, looking around a local park in a seminar called "reading the scene" and many others. I was in an occupational therapy seminar where we broke up into groups of three and were given a person with some sort of disability and we had to research and design a house to help meet the needs of the individual. My client lived in Africa and had severe arthritis in her wrists, elbows and shoulders. Our house had swinging doors to avoid having to grip to door handles, an open floor plan to avoid doors, and an easy access from both inside and outside to the wood stove that he had. Following our dinner break, we had an extremely inspirational speaker named Pam who talked to us about her experiences in starting an organization in Sri Lanka following the tsunami in 2004. She was actually living in Sri Lanka when the tragedy happened and she knew that she couldn't just not do anything when there were so many people in such terrible conditions. Her and her husband started up a group called Impakt Aid. They did a lot of amazing things to help out the people of the country. I was completely in awe for the whole presentation. With her group she is now running a program in Sri Lanka called Work for Widows. This program has the women making jewelry and other accessories that are then sold and they are paid. (for more information you can visit www.workforwidows.com or www.impaktaid.com) The whole talk really opened my eyes. Following this, we went to the physics building at Dal and made planispheres, looked through a telescope (at a light because it was too cloudy to see stars) and then enjoyed the planetarium. It was also a a very interesting experience, as I love astronomy. I learned many strategies for finding stars and what to look for in seasons and much more. Overall, it was a very enjoyable day here in Halifax! :)
Jennifer Schmidt, Shad Valley Dalhousie University 2010
Hometown: Wetaskiwin, Alberta
