A day in Sligo!

My typical weekday starts at 8am I wake up the earliest in the group, because I need to catch the bus earlier to get to my placement. Once I am ready I eat a light breakfast and make my lunch for the day. Then I walk to where my bus picks me up. The bus rides are one of my faviorte parts of the day!

On the bus each morning I see two of the service users I work with all day then the others on the bus are in other day activity homes. This bus ride gives me the chance to interact with the service users in a comfortable enviorment. It also allows me to see how they interact one-on-one with other service users.

Once I arrive at my placement I am greeted by many of the service users. They ask about my evening and agree with me about how beautiful Ireland is. They ask me if I  got in touch with my family back home and love showing me pictures of there families. Once all of the service users have arrived they start their day.

They break into groups, one is an art group that makes life size art, another group is newspaper and they read the paper together and talk about their enviorment and what is going on in the world, lastly some go to sports!

I get to go to sports or stay behind with the art group. When I go to sports they learn simple motor skills. This week they were working on football skills. When I say football I mean soccer. They decided that they were doing well with hand cordanition so it was time to move to the bottom half of the body. I worked with one individual who is in great shape he did well and had a strong foot. This was exciting for the service users because Sligo was playing soon and they all seem to enjoy watching football. The art group started to make the yellow submarine from the Beatles. They were excited when I returened to the workshop because they wanted to show me what they came up with and it was starting to look great.

Then I go to lunch and enjoy conversation with the staff. They really enjoy telling me the hidden secrets of Sligo and enjoy hearing about my night.

Once lunch is over I stay at the workshop and it is time for music! This is an exciting time for the service users they really enjoy dancing, clapping, and singing to new and old songs. One individual starts singing off first. His name is Martin he is amazingly smart. He knows the name if each song, who sings it and when it came out. He sang Sweet Caroline which stole my heart. It was so amazing and cute! After music Martin comes over and talks to me about my flight into Ireland. He loves airplanes. When I say love don't mean collects models. He knows so much about planes and when they are taking off and when they should land. He knows when certain airlines opened and where they flew to. I normally get lost in the conversation because the information  he knows goes over my head. He is very impressive.

After music I have a tea break and get ready for my goodbyes for the day. This is the hardest part of the day because I really enjoy my placement and I know that soon I will be leaving for then last time.

Once I arrive home I normally relax and wait for the others to get home. Then we normally have dinner together. Once we eat we decided to get ready and enjoy the night life at the local pubs and getting to know some Irish students. We do our best not to stand out but were Americans and its like we have it written on our forheads. Here in Ireland the students dont really come to the pubs till midnight so when we do go out it is a long night. I enjoy going out and meeting new people it helps understand the culture more. We try to switch pubs so we can see the different enviorments and enjoy some Irish music in most places.

Once we all get home we normaly talk a little about the day over some chips which are called crisps here in Ireland. Then once we all are extreamly tired we go to our rooms and go to sleep.

That's a typical weekday in Sligo. It looks like a lot because it is a lot! We decided as a group of house mates that we are going to enjoy and learn as much as possible. Staying out late does come with the slow mornings, however, it is all worth it because we may never get the chance again to come back to Ireland.