First day of school

Monday March 20th – The first day of school! We began the day with an overview of the course and introductions. Our classmates are Simone Leahy and Laura Hunt who are students at Latrobe University; they hope to become O&M instructors. Our course leader is Jhaneen Trimble who is an orientation and mobility instructor with a specialty in ABI (Acquired Brain Injury). She had been at GDV for 4 years in the ABI department, was a local O&M for 3 years and spent a year in Canada doing O&M work as well. She is very nice and the course outline looks really good. We then took a tour of the campus and met the CEO Grahme White. One of our first lessons was how to make your own blindfold with thin colored foam (seen here)!

There are two retrain students here as well. They will be training on campus for 2 weeks then each will receive a 1 week transition. GDV has several types of instructors. Some train dogs only, some train the dogs and the clients, and some are field reps. The instructor in class trained both the dogs, is the only instructor in class, and will be doing the transitions.

Our days are spent with classroom lecture in the morning then practical application in the afternoon. The first day was a good refresher for Susan and I as we covered self protection and sighted guide techniques. This was the first introduction to being under blindfold for Simone and Laura and it was fun to see how quickly they gained confidence. While working with them I realized that I take many things for granted in working with our clients as they usually have a solid understanding of these basics and are, for the most part, comfortable moving around without sight. Jhaneen had some good tips and techniques that I didn’t know about (or forgot!) and we practiced walking all over the GDV campus.

This evening I drove in Australia for the first time. What an experience. As you know they drive on the “wrong” side of the road here. The driver’s seat is on the right side of the car, which means you have to use your left hand to shift gears. Thank God the car we are using is an automatic! It’s bad enough that almost every time I try to signal I turn on the windshield wipers! Susan and I drove into the town of Kew and signed up at the local YMCA. We have the best intentions of working out and we’ll see how well we can stick to it. The food here in the dorm is as good as our dorm which means I better have myself in the gym several times each week!