Paulina is currently on the Nepal Adventure Guide Program and she's given us an insight into her first two weeks on program. From Outdoor First Aid to rock climbing, check out her comments here!
"Challenging and exciting, are the first two words that come to my mind when I think about my first few weeks on the Nepal Adventure Guide Program, it's just the beginning and I can't believe the amount of learning accomplished in just a few weeks.
The Advance Wilderness First Aid was a perfect balance between tons of useful information and practice, practice and more practice. Putting our knowledge to the test through role play and fake emergency scenarios was surprisingly fun and a bit stressful even if you know that is just a practice, is crazy thinking that you can't know for sure how your behaviour and reaction is going to be in the event of an emergency, so the practice exercises were an amazing way of discovering that also allowed us to start trusting our own knowledge and team mates.
That's another lesson that I take with me from these days, team work makes the dream work. During our first aid course it was super important to trust your team and rely on them when you didn't know exactly what to do in the case of an emergency, we needed to work together and complement each other to succeed in the task.
We also completed level one Rock climbing, and it blew my mind how quickly you can progress when you are constant. I started the first day having to quit a climbing route because I got so scared of the height, but on my last day of climbing I was practicing falling and mock lead climbing, something that I couldn't ever imagine that first day! All thanks to the amazing support from the team and instructors.
In our group is a wide range of different levels of experience in rock climbing, and I could see how each person made their own progress in the program, trying to get higher in a specific route, learning how to make an anchor, lead climb a new route, etc. It's so nice to see the support and encouragement from your team and instructors, such a beautiful group of people wishing everyone to succeed.
I feel so grateful and lucky to be sharing this experience with people eager to learn and with so many different levels of experience, I can't wait for the learning and adventures that are ahead of me!" - Paulina Ojeda