Week 7: Almost The End

This week, we had two hours of class each day to make up for the missing day. I feel like each class should have been around two hours long instead of 90 minutes. We were able to accomplish a lot in a day by doing this.

On Tuesday, the professor allowed us to choose topics we want to discuss, and we chose grammar. Grammar is so important in Spanish as it has an abundance of rules and conjugations. We wanted to make sure we nailed it. Other than that, we spent the class learning about vocabulary for male and female reproductive systems.

On Thursday, the first 45 minutes of class, we spent doing oral homework. We each found a news article related to Hispanic medicines and prepared a summary in Spanish to deliver in class. I did my speech on the article about obstetric violence. It is a very serious issue as it is considered a violation of women’s rights. In these cases, the health professionals limited care for the in-labor mother-to-be for the sake of efficiency, which all ended up being very unethical and resulted in the woman having lasting emotional and physical wounds.

On Saturday, we finished up the book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, and did our final discussion posts. We were all very saddened and disappointed with the ending of our main character, Lia Lee because she was a real person, not a fictional character and all that happened to her was real-life. A lot of the things that happened to her could have been prevented only if there were better cultural understanding and effective communication through a bilingual and bicultural interpreter. I have learned a lot about the Hmong people and how to better connect with multicultural patients through this book.

On a lighter note, for the cultural activity, my friends and I had a picnic, and I made Mexican street corn, esquites, and dumplings. We went to the park near my house with a beautiful lake. It was perfect because the weather was so hot, but the conversations and food were even hotter.