Nightmare Day at Work

Early November

Definitely my toughest day at work ever. Today was the first day of workshops, I had the false expectation that this meant some time to do some of my admin and jobs, do some planning etc. our communication workshops are not until the end, so here I was thinking there would be some time to get some things done, oh I was sadly mistaken. The first day of workshops is the biggest, every new referral since the workshops of the previous term is invited. so this meant that 60 kids & carers had been invited. Thankfully only 40 of the 60 turned up. Most workshops involve lots of practical activities where there is a small amount of teaching and then some time for mums to practice what they are taught with their children, but this day involved the mostly teaching, so the children were all placed in a separate room to be taken care of while the mums/carers were in workshops. It was nothing short of a nightmare. The kids are mostly new to the program, so not familiar with the people or the place. All the other staff had warned us to be ready for tears. On paper, only two staff are allocated to care or the children each day…which means about 20 kids each. So naturally, anyone who was free was called into help, receptions staff, admin staff, kids from the village, but none of them were constantly there. I spent the whole day in with the kids, and I was totally wrecked by the end. T was kids and babies everywhere screaming their heads off, we were only aloud to take the kids back to their parents of absolutely necessary. What defined this I was never really sure. Kids were so scared they were weeing everywhere, the whole room smelt terrible, we had originally carefully chosen fun toys to play with, thinking this could be a great chance to spend time with kids, maybe assess their language, encourage some interaction….it became nothing more than damage control. Stopping this child from hitting that child, stopping his feet from hitting her head in the middle of his tantrum, moving children away from squashing each other, re position kids who had fallen over. Remembering of course that all these kids have multiple disabilities, so it was far from easy. By the end of the day I would stand back find the child screaming most hysterically, try and calm them, do my best to get them to sleep and then start again. I got changed twice, had a shower once, from babies wetting themselves all over me. It was an absolute nightmare, I was a bit horrified by what I saw actually. The conditions were terrible, if we were assessed by a childcare facility im sure we would have been shot. Our ratios were totally out, and My feedback is definitely that it should never ever happen that way again. We did have fun trying different ways to settle them. We took it in turns of doing stupid things to get their attention, we tried putting music on really loudly, victor tried telling jokes and I taught them how to juggle… which did little more than amuse ourselves with those activities though… as none of them had any idea what was going on!! we tried teaching the younger ones to settle the older ones, but we didn’t have much to work with, our three oldest children have problems of their own, mphatso is very unstable on his feet, so he kept falling on other kids while trying to help them, but he was very good at apologizing, although he screaming child didn’t care. Simeon is a four year old boy who has downs syndrome, and he was absolutely gorgeous in trying to comfort some of the younger ones, but he has a really really big drooling problem, so lots of kids ended up rather messy after he’d helped them. And he had poor toy choices with kids, he was trying to get a paraplegic boy to push a car, I loved his heart though. But he really sucked at his job. And jonathan has troubles with tantrums of his own, he has a tendency of hitting and biting people when they don’t do what he wants, so although he would kindly attempt to settle a child, If things didn’t work out how he planned, it turned ugly. So we had damage control on top of damage control. we sang songs, we tired ignoring them all, we decided to leave them all alone for a few minutes and see if that miraculously solved the problem, pretty much nothing worked. There were two kids who had a great time. They were hearing impaired, and on that day we all wished we were!! It was one day I wished my camera was working, the battery was totally dead, but I had moments that couldn’t help but make me laugh, all of us had every knee, hand and foot in use, at one stage I had a little girl sitting in a chair across from me who I was singing with, as long as she had eye contact with someone, she didn’t cry, a little boy off to my right who I was patting with my foot, every now and then I would have to catch the boy on my left with my foot to stop him from falling forward on his face and I had two kids on my knee, and one in a chitenje on my back. So we were all super human that day. And I was absolutely wrecked!!!!