February: volunteering and other extracurricular activities

Volunteering for the Teddy Bear Hospital (TBH) main event

I had the pleasure to volunteer with the TBH, which is a student-lead charity with the aim of reducing children’s anxiety about going to the hospital and promoting health education (e.g. exercise, healthy eating etc.) For TBH main event, they encourage children (who are 3-10 years old) to bring their teddy bears with them and to give them a check-up at the event. On the day, I had two different jobs. Firstly, I was leading the GP station where I taught the children how to listen to the heart beat with a stethoscope, measure the blood pressure and how to check the teddy’s eyes for a pupillary light reflex (that is if you shine a light to someone’s healthy eyes, their pupil will constrict and if you remove the light source, the pupil will dilate again). Since (obviously) the teddy’s do not have a pupillary reflex, I let the children shine a light to my eyes instead. I did not think that through because after three hours of having 50+ children shining lights into my eyes, I started seeing white circles everywhere I looked. After that, I was put on the imaging station where I let the children guess the bone on an X ray image and to my surprise, most of them knew where to find these bones in a human body! By the way, each TBH volunteer received a special T-shirt and mine says “Dr Miu” from behind J

Teaching breast self-examination

Sexpression (a charity I have been volunteering with for three years now) teamed up with the charity “Coppafeel”, whose goal is to raise awareness about breast self-examination. During this workshop, I ran a stall on how to examine your breasts with fake breast models that we own. I enjoyed myself and learnt a lot of fun facts, for example that on average, a woman in the UK owns eight bras.

Vietnamese Society events

The Vietnamese Society in Sheffield has run quite a few events in the past few weeks, e.g. the Lunar New Year dinner or the International Food Festival. However, we are only about to run our biggest event of the year, the Vietnamese Culture Day (VCD). We expect a turnout of minimum 250 guests and we are currently in intense preparation mode. Below, you can find our official poster for the VCD event this year (I hope you recognised me). If you are free and around South Yorkshire, I would love to invite to join us at the VCD event, I promise you will not regret it.