The Pivotal Roles in CCNDA>Ms. Yu-mei Kao, Social Worker

Ms. Yu-mei Kao, Social Worker Origin     The Social Worker Ms. Yu-mei Kao has a loving heart and passion to all tutored children. This was the first time we were so impressed with tears to see how a teacher put in efforts to help children. Parents cherish their children, but some children need more care and companionship. Interview 1.How long have you been a social worker? Why did you choose this job?    Almost 2 years. Because I feel a social worker job can discover a sense of value during the procedure of helping people. I feel a social worker job is very meaningful, and my personality likes to help people, so I chose this job. 2.What are the job contents of a social worker?    As long as there is a case in the society asking for help to improve their life, it belongs to the contents of social work. I work more in the service of family. The social work also includes personal case such as solving people’s mind problems. For family cases, some single-parent disadvantaged families cannot invest enough resources to help in their children’s growing procedure, so a social worker will provide them different help according to their needs. 3.Do you like this job? What fun does this job bring to you?     When I see a person in difficult situation, I can help him and lead him to see the new hope of life through this job. This is my fun. 4.What graders of children do you serve and counsel? What are the main problems for them to need your help? How do you get alone with them?    Our children are from 2nd graders to 9th graders. We have more children from single-mother family or foreign-spouse family. They are relatively short of parenting communication. In this situation, children’s learning desire is lower, so they generally have problem with interpersonal communication.    We need to help them to discover their own difficult point. Some students have interpersonal relationship problem at school. I feel that it is important to initiatively care their needs and share with them. They long for attention. If you guys can give them more care and help, be friendly to them, and give them affirmation, you will get alone with them gradually. They have some disgusting behaviors, but I hope you can pardon these and remind them. 5.Is there any bottleneck you encountered during the counseling procedure? How did you overcome it?    The children from more complicated families are more difficult, since the problem may be not only caused by the children or their mother, and could be caused by the other family members. It is not easy to bring everyone to the same page. Also, our internal teachers may have different opinions so that we need to integrate these too. Moreover, the interaction of interpersonal relationship at school is another difficulty. How do we interact with these children and get to know people around them? I feel that we need to first accept them and let them love themselves, so that they will be willing to communicate with the others. If a child is used to blame on others, but never review himself, it will be more difficult to counsel. 6.We heard that social work teachers sometimes need to visit students’ families, and they noticed that some parents were indifferent to their children. Have you met the similar situation? How did you communicate with their parents?    We need to do family visit in order to see children’s family environment. As long as they accept family visit, they are willing to be helped. We normally started with care and greeting. Since their children are here and our teachers pay attention to take care of them, they know family visit is necessary. We would let them understand that we are on their side. 7.Are you an employee under CCNDA’s infrastructure or just a supporting staff? When did you come to work for CCNDA? How long have you been here? What is your thought about working here?    I am a part-time professional tutorial staff here starting from January last year. Sometimes we feel frustrated when we saw the children were not easy to be changed. In fact, the most difficult work for a social worker is to discover the method to be used to clarify children’s problems. This job requires thinking, and lots of time on resource coordination. It is tough. 8.How can we do to care the disadvantaged? Could social work teachers give us some suggestions?    You need an empathy heart to accept the disadvantaged. Many children feel they are pushed aside, and their classmates treat them with unusual view. These may be caused by their poor evaluation on themselves and misunderstanding on the others. The empathy helps us understand that everyone has different need, so that we need to find out. The accepting mind helps us to pardon ourselves. (Source of photos: Shot by the Community Care Team) Conclusion     Ms. Kao said: “If our society listens and cares a person with love more, more people will be helped”. We need to learn empathy and accepting mind. We cannot be too self-centered and only focus on our own need in our life, and this was an additional conclusion for us from this Cyberfair project too. We think that it is not easy for us to keep an accepting heart, since we like to make joke from time to time, and we dislike dirty and poor people. The teacher encouraged us to listen and learn gradually so that we will be able to make it when we grow up.