Jishi Santos About Me Page at Helium

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About me - Jishi Santos

About me

I am a writer from my schooldays and would often scribble poetry or stories onto paper if a lecture bored me. Over time I built a collection of poetry up and during times of unemployment would employ my time writing childrens' stories.When I met my wife Jane she too was a writer and so the creative passion for writing grew. She encouraged me to join Helium. I am also a photographer and designer.We live in a beautiful part of Australia near the southern coast but prior to this travelled to many parts of Australia for five years in our campervan.

I have worked in Papua-New Guinea in 1963, as a teacher of grade 5 students. This took place on the north coast of Papua at Wedua village,Dogura. Beautiful setting and I was only nineteen teaching some students only three years younger than myself. In 1964, I worked as an education officer in the Highlands for the government instructing villagers who lived at 12,000 above sea level on how to place a voting paper into a ballot box. One of the men rolled his tobacco in it and smoked it!

After this I taught at Melbourne Grammar school for ten years, again in grade 5, and Carey Grammar school for another six in primary and junior secondary. In both these schools I was involved in sporting coaching, outdoor camping education and school magazine production.

I then moved into the disability field and taught in a private school for blind students and worked here for four years involved in work skills and community based training for eventual assimilation into the outside world. My work in this field saw me as a gardening instructor at the blind school and also for four years on a working farm for autistic adults. Freelance programming at a large government institution for severely handicapped adults was next and then the same sort of work within communities at weekends for recreation.

Taxi driving for four years gained me my degree in life and then it was back to teaching as deputy headmaster of a small newly formed primary school on the fringes of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, Southern Africa. Returning to Australia I then set about designing activity programs in nursing homes based around gardening. And now I am retired and enjoying writing for Helium.