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In Her Own Words Our New Intern Anne.
There’s a new kid on the block....or should I say a new person working at the M-POWER office?! Hello everybody. Some of you I have already had the privilege to meet and I’m sure I’ll get to meet a lot more of you during the next few months I’ll be here at M-POWER. My name is Anne Thoegersen. I am from Denmark a rather small (population 5 million) and unknown country, which is located just north of Germany. I’ll be doing a five month internship in social work at M- POWER. In Denmark the school system is rather different and the social worker education there takes three years. I am in the second half of my second year, which means that with any luck I’ll graduate in the summer of 2002. It has taken me quite a while to get into social work. I started out studying political science in 1983 (going for a masters), I then entered an East Asian Area Studies Program in 1986 and got so fascinated, that I applied for a scholarship and went to Japan in 1988 to study political science and Japanese for a year at Tokai University in Kanagawa 40 miles west of Tokyo. When I returned to Denmark one of the first things I did was to buy a motorcycle, a thing which would change my life completely a few years later. In the summer of 1991 I was in a pretty bad accident because a car made a turn right in front of my bike and I went flying, landing on the roof of the car. I was taken to the hospital but sent home and because they didn’t examine me properly it took me four years to realize that something was seriously wrong. I was trying to move on with my life at the usual pace, although I was in quite a lot of pain most of the time, but my main problem was that my brain no longer functioned in the manner it had before. In 1995, when I was finally examined properly by neurologists and neuropsychologists they found out that I had a whiplash condition. Whiplash was something nobody connected with anything but car accidents in 1991. The doctors concluded that I must have suffered a concussion which explained the symptoms I was now displaying which were similar to those of brain damage. I had huge memory lapses, difficulties with concentrating even on the simplest things and problems with constant headaches which just made the rest of the symptoms worse. I had to leave my studies—which weren’t going very well—and went on social security for three and a half years. I have no memory of large parts of this time period. I felt like I was in limbo and I’d never get my life back. It took me the longest time to start pulling things back together. I slowly returned to life entering a rehab program in which I spent two years at a school of photography. I attended the school a couple of hours a day or as much as I could handle. Then in the autumn of 1999 I took a great leap and went back to school to get an education. Because of everything I'd been through during the preceding years, my perspective had completely changed and I feel that the education that I chose is consistent with this change. I still cope with my disability every day. But by now it has become a part of my life and identity. I can talk about it and live with it. During my second semester at The National School of Social Work, Aarhus, I wrote a project about HIV/ AIDS and the consequences and effects of the new medication on the people affected by HIV. The project was mainly about the psycho-social aspects of living with the disease and with the new medications which can have very serious side effects. The project dealt with the difficulties of living with death as a natural and closely integrated part of your life and writing it was a humbling experience as my own slight brush with death and my own problems seemed to diminish as I listened to their stories. At that point I decided that I wanted my internship to have something to do with HIV/AIDS. In the autumn of 2000 I went on a two week study tour to Boston. We took classes at Boston University School of Social Work and visited different places in the Boston area. One of the places we went to was M-POWER. 30 some Danes and probably about five members of M-POWER were crammed into the conference room at the Boston office. We listened to stories of personal hardship and growth and strength. I was so taken in with the people, the place and the whole atmosphere, that I there and then decided that this would be a great place to do my internship-a learning experience beyond what I could expect anywhere else. I also felt that this would be a place with room for anybody and even with my disability I would be welcome and accepted here. The empowerment experience of the members here is becoming an empowering experience for me and I must say I haven’t been disappointed so far. The people at the office say I fit right in, which I is a compliment!?! I am mainly working on two projects here. First of all I’m interviewing consumers about the Informed Consent Campaign and their experiences with that. These interviews are for a book I’m writing for M-POWER. The other project I am currently working on is a cemetery project. I’m working with Rogelio Duval trying to find the graves of former patients at Boston State Hospital to memorialize their final resting place. Besides these two main projects I’m working in the office, so you may get me on the phone if you call us. I’d like to thank everybody for the way I have been received here. Everybody has been extremely open and friendly and very helpful when I keep asking the same questions over and over again. There are so many new and exciting things here and one thing is for sure: there are no two identical days at M-POWER. Between Andrew, Rita, Ann, Melinda, Deborah, and the people we share the office space with there is always something interesting or fun going on around here and there is never a dull moment.
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