i want to be a nurse in africa ... or a ballerina




The tickle


posted by Jenn

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I realize it has been a while and I don’t have a real excuse. Being a nurse these days honestly feels like all I could have ever imagined it could be and then some. Life on the ship is as lovely as ever. And Africa remains….Africa. (Nuff said).

So, “why the prolonged silence???” I had to ask myself.

And the best I can come up with is that my blogging silence may be directly related to the relative silence I have embraced as of late in my professional role. As far as verbal communication goes….things are harder here. Although I never even came close to achieving the fluency with Liberian English of my friend Ali, I might have come in a very distant second….or maybe fifth. Regardless, I made do. But, like I said – things are harder here. It seems that skipping out on French class in elementary school to write plays for extra credit was a poor decision.

So I have been left figuring out other ways to communicate with the children placed in my charge. Lucky for them, I seem to remember someone teaching me at some point that only 9.3% of communication is verbal. Or maybe it is 14.6% (it would be fair at this point to question whether I actually attended school at all). What I do know is that it is possible, if not completely necessary, to learn to connect with another person without the use of words.

Which brings me to the point of this mostly-senseless-thus-far rambling: I have recently discovered the significance of “the tickle”.

It started with Junior. It happened three weeks ago, which, in case you are keeping track, is quite a number of weeks into this outreach. I might have been starting to question whether or not I would be able to ever connect with these kids the way I wanted. But I quickly found that, at any given time, day or night, I could produce the most glorious 7-yr-old belly laugh just by tickling / tackling him to the ground. Chalking it up to coincidence and the uniqueness of the child, I refused to give myself too much credit.

However, a double-fisted handful of 2 – 10yr olds later and I am willing to make a very bold assertion: Communication really IS 91.2% non-verbal. Through balloons, bubbles, online crayola colouring pages, and most importantly, embracing the tickle monster that lives inside me (and I would be willing to argue – all of us), I have some new very sweet friends.


Perhaps, I could have learned this lesson (or French) at some point in school. I am pretty sure I would chose to learn it this way.

I realize it has been a while and I don’t have a real excuse. Being a nurse these days honestly feels like all I could have ever imagined it could be and then some. Life on the ship is as lovely as ever. And Africa remains….Africa. (Nuff said).

So, “why the prolonged silence???” I had to ask myself.

And the best I can come up with is that my blogging silence may be directly related to the relative silence I have embraced as of late in my professional role. As far as verbal communication goes….things are harder here. Although I never even came close to achieving the fluency with Liberian English of my friend Ali, I might have come in a very distant second….or maybe fifth. Regardless, I made do. But, like I said – things are harder here. It seems that skipping out on French class in elementary school to write plays for extra credit was a poor decision.

So I have been left figuring out other ways to communicate with the children placed in my charge. Lucky for them, I seem to remember someone teaching me at some point that only 9.3% of communication is verbal. Or maybe it is 14.6% (it would be fair at this point to question whether I actually attended school at all). What I do know is that it is possible, if not completely necessary, to learn to connect with another person without the use of words.

Which brings me to the point of this mostly-senseless-thus-far rambling: I have recently discovered the significance of “the tickle”.

It started with Junior. It happened three weeks ago, which, in case you are keeping track, is quite a number of weeks into this outreach. I might have been starting to question whether or not I would be able to ever connect with these kids the way I wanted. But I quickly found that, at any given time, day or night, I could produce the most glorious 7-yr-old belly laugh just by tickling / tackling him to the ground. Chalking it up to coincidence and the uniqueness of the child, I refused to give myself too much credit.

However, a double-fisted handful of 2 – 10yr olds later and I am willing to make a very bold assertion: Communication really IS 91.2% non-verbal. Through balloons, bubbles, online crayola colouring pages, and most importantly, embracing the tickle monster that lives inside me (and I would be willing to argue – all of us), I have some new very sweet friends.


Perhaps, I could have learned this lesson (or French) at some point in school. I am pretty sure I would chose to learn it this way.