Join me as I prove to you that the saying, "Travelling is a part of Education" is very true
There's always this joy that comes with the class embarking on a journey outside the school premises and no doubt, it's stress relieving to always embark on one of such journeys.
In a way, I go for excursions everyday as a medical student since we no longer have classroom lectures but learn directly from the consulting room with patients that came to the hospital, but well, that's my own classroom I think as it didn't give me the joy the proper excursion we went gave me.
The first excursion I went to dates back to when I was in primary school, but, for the purpose of this prompt, I will be talking about the excursion I went as an undergraduate last year.
It was when I was doing my Community medicine posting and as such we were expected to know our community very well and that led us to visiting the National Arbovirus and Vectors Research Center in Enugu State, Nigeria.
The excursion was on November 11, 2022. We contributed a token of #1000 (about $1.4) each for the transportation.
It was not expensive because my campus was also in Enugu.Everyone paid and were anticipating the date for our visit.
The night before the D-day, I slept but you needed to see the way I scattered my phone with alarms, lol. I literally had alarms set every 5mins from 4:30am so that I won't be late for the venue we will board a bus as we were meant to leave by 7:30am.
I finally woke up around 5am and started preparing and before 6:30am, my friends and I were done and we decided to wait till 7am so that it doesn't look as if we were the only ones so happy to be going there.
We finally left by 7am (it was just a 15minutes walk) and on reaching the venue, we saw our coursemates in multitude already waiting for the bus to come.
The lecturers were there already, they organized everything so well and we left at exactly 8:16am (African time at work, hehe)
The Arbovirus centre was also lenient enough to send us one of their buses to ease our transportation.
We arrived at the venue around 11am, we were welcomed very well by the staffs of the vicinity and subsequently directed to their auditorium.
They thanked us for coming and also gave us theory of what they do there before proceeding to take us to the laboratory where they do them.
Arbovirus means Arthropod-borne viruses.
They are group of viruses that are transmitted to humans by insects which includes but not limited to tsetse fly, mosquitoes and ticks.
So basically what they do is research on these insects because of their economic importance of causing various diseases.
I made a post about what we were taught Know Mosquitoes better, you can check it out if you're curious.
They showed us some of the equipments they use...
The showed us their research rooms
Finally, they gave us some of the mosquitoes to visualize with the help of a microscope.
My friends and I
They offered us light refreshments and told us they will be waiting for some of us up join them after their graduation and we all laughed over it.
We arrived our campus by 9pm despite the fact that We left the venue around 5pm as a result of traffic but we weren't perturbed as we were all gisting about what we just saw.
It was really an enjoyable experience and we learnt a lot.
We've been taught about arthropods thousands of times in classroom and lecture theatres but somehow I end up forgetting some of the details but just visiting the research center and seeing them with my naked eyes made it stick better.
I believe that with this testimony of mine, you will believe with me if you were In doubts and you will believe more if you believed small initially that travelling is also a part of Education.
All Pictures Are Mine
Thanks for reading and have a nice day