I.S.Y.M.C.S. for Beginners!
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Hardehausen - an otherwise originally beautiful village in the SE of Dortmund - has many attractions you probably never heard of. Among some beautiful lakes, a bar and a famous café (see www.hardehausen.de for terrific photographs from above), there is a certain resort for students, teachers and all kinds of groups. This resort has an awfully interesting history: Founded in 1140 as a monastery, Hardehausen became more of a youth hostel-like resort during the last century, and was acknowledged as such in 1945 (motto: Hardehausen - and heaven can wait). About 200 visitors can stay there now for vacation, workshops and all kinds of seminars.
I had the pleasure to attend one of them, a so-called I.S.Y.M.C.S., the Introductiory Seminar for Young Men in Civil Services, or in other words, if the part of the hospital you work in is for some reason the OR, they will teach nothing you'll ever really need to know. What they teach is the following:
- Civil services in Germany and the Catholic Church's opinion on that subject
- The rights and duties of young men in civil services
- how to move a patient in, into and out of his bed without breaking your spine.
What they DON'T teach is how to survive that time from 9 AM to 5:30 PM without breaking into a terrible and uncontrollable mood disorder.
Anyway - what we finally learned is this:
- Communication can also be non-verbal; still if this communication is coming from our seminar teachers, some people don't care about it at all.
- If you spend 3 hours in one room listening to a fountain outside and looking at your verbally communicating seminar teacher having a whole lot of fun, you no doubt go nuts!
- Blowing up a hospital glove and putting it on your head looks funny.
- During a regular week of work in the hospital you could (theoretically, if you did nothing besides) disinfect your hands 924 times. In eleven months of civil services - by the way - you could do that same process 178,322 times.
- Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm is a really terrific book.
- The ceiling of our seminar-room consists of 4992 tiles, which caused me to go nuts again.
It's easy to see that doing a seminar at Hardehausen can be fun.
We were a bunch of 29 guys just out of school desperate to go and learn something. First step was: our teachers wanted us to get to know each other. So we invented that great game of giving each other animal names, like Tim Tiger, Robert the Reindeer or Dennis Dachshund. Our teacher proudly called himself Jaguar. This year's highlight though was Olaf Opossum, a fun guy who had stories on nearly anything. He was like a book, a fat book (no offense!) to be exact.
In the soccer game that night Opossum acted as referee, and by having Ant pass the ball to Groundhog who kicked it over to T-rex, back to Groundhog, we scored the first of two points. The final score of 11-2 will disappear from the history books in no-time.
It was fun, really, and the monastery was very impressive (go have a look at it); it's just that us young men who don't really agree with having to do civil services and therefore having to wait a year until university, don't have the greatest enthusiasm about having to sit in rooms all day long and learn things they won't need again.
The only thing I think we really needed to find out (and this is a fact), was that girls from wherever the ones we met there came from - Meschede and surroundings - are simply the prettier ones.
Co-researchers on that bit: Michel, Sascha, Ralf and Dennis
I had the pleasure to attend one of them, a so-called I.S.Y.M.C.S., the Introductiory Seminar for Young Men in Civil Services, or in other words, if the part of the hospital you work in is for some reason the OR, they will teach nothing you'll ever really need to know. What they teach is the following:
- Civil services in Germany and the Catholic Church's opinion on that subject
- The rights and duties of young men in civil services
- how to move a patient in, into and out of his bed without breaking your spine.
What they DON'T teach is how to survive that time from 9 AM to 5:30 PM without breaking into a terrible and uncontrollable mood disorder.
Anyway - what we finally learned is this:
- Communication can also be non-verbal; still if this communication is coming from our seminar teachers, some people don't care about it at all.
- If you spend 3 hours in one room listening to a fountain outside and looking at your verbally communicating seminar teacher having a whole lot of fun, you no doubt go nuts!
- Blowing up a hospital glove and putting it on your head looks funny.
- During a regular week of work in the hospital you could (theoretically, if you did nothing besides) disinfect your hands 924 times. In eleven months of civil services - by the way - you could do that same process 178,322 times.
- Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm is a really terrific book.
- The ceiling of our seminar-room consists of 4992 tiles, which caused me to go nuts again.
It's easy to see that doing a seminar at Hardehausen can be fun.
We were a bunch of 29 guys just out of school desperate to go and learn something. First step was: our teachers wanted us to get to know each other. So we invented that great game of giving each other animal names, like Tim Tiger, Robert the Reindeer or Dennis Dachshund. Our teacher proudly called himself Jaguar. This year's highlight though was Olaf Opossum, a fun guy who had stories on nearly anything. He was like a book, a fat book (no offense!) to be exact.
In the soccer game that night Opossum acted as referee, and by having Ant pass the ball to Groundhog who kicked it over to T-rex, back to Groundhog, we scored the first of two points. The final score of 11-2 will disappear from the history books in no-time.
It was fun, really, and the monastery was very impressive (go have a look at it); it's just that us young men who don't really agree with having to do civil services and therefore having to wait a year until university, don't have the greatest enthusiasm about having to sit in rooms all day long and learn things they won't need again.
The only thing I think we really needed to find out (and this is a fact), was that girls from wherever the ones we met there came from - Meschede and surroundings - are simply the prettier ones.
Co-researchers on that bit: Michel, Sascha, Ralf and Dennis
