Personal Experiences

Occupational therapy is the therapeutic use of work, self-care, as well as playing activities aimed at enhancing development and at the same time prevents disability. All these are done to foster and enhance quality of human life. It is a career worth pursuing and I have personally come to love it from my experience and background. It has helped me identify myself and the qualities that I possess and helped to serve people better in society.

The paper is a critical analysis of my personal experiences that prepared me to successfully interact and work with various people from different and diverse cultural backgrounds. The ways in which my special abilities, training as well as experiences are related to occupational therapy are brought to light.

For me, to be able to successfully interact and work with people from diverse cultural backgrounds I strongly believe that my earlier experiences with varied persons from different cultures especially from elementary school to university must have played a big role. This coupled with reading various materials concerning culture shock gave me an upper hand to interact with these people. I was able to understand my assumption about others, how culture affects behavior as well as building a buffer against any assumptions that could bring biasness.

I was able to mingle and share with those from a different socio-economic background, and I learnt a lot concerning these different persons background while at school i.e. their beliefs, assumptions, values, rules, norms, skills and art, custom. Such skills are only acquired through experience and most of all a passion and desire to learn and impart other people’s lives.

It all started from my background, where I grew up with my uncle, aunt and cousin who were practicing occupational therapists and were all dedicated. This gave me the early experience to know what occupational therapy entails. This background had a significant influence since the childhood innocence was all infected with the minds of pursuing this career. In addition, a lot of my fiends are occupational therapists, this motivates me immensely in that I see my peers in the same field and we share the expertise in the field according to once experiences. This makes it easier to overcome the challenges posed by this career and hence more attraction to it.

My experience from volunteering at the daycares as well has contributed more to the passion that I have for occupational therapy. I worked with kids who couldn’t walk well and who couldn’t move their hands well and I helped them at the daycare. This helped me ignite my spirits in pursuing this career since it would help bring a feeling of satisfaction in helping the helpless in society. It also helped me to discover myself and my personal abilities such as; good communication skills, tolerance, understanding, patience and kindness. I was able to bring hope to the kids as well as their parents; and hence spreading the message of love.

The formal training I acquired from school concerning the processes of OT, area of application as well as the challenges facing the field helped me to successfully practice it. This resulted to a significant change to the physical and mental health of these kids.

In conclusion, I believe that people will always work with people from different cultural background and to be successful, one need to understand these peoples’ culture, customs, beliefs, assumptions, skill and values among others. My experience of being close to people from diverse culture seemed to have helped me to successfully interact and work with them and bring a sense of hope in their lives; and I can say with certainty that OT is a profession that imparts people’s lives.