JOYCE:  So anyway, I was chosen to be the one that learned to give immunizations. 

KAREN:  Now, did you volunteer or somebody picked you or how did that happen? 

JOYCE:  As I recall, the nurse asked questions.  There was one person that did some medical work in the village which was Dora -- at that time, Dora -- let's see, Aaga.  She later was, after her husband died, she remarried, but she -- she would not give shots.  She didn't want to learn.  She did a lot of the emergency things just on her own.  But the nurse took me along.  She was holding clinic at one of the other village houses, which was not better than ours, and she give me instructions.  At that time there were -- you had a single syringe and just different needles.  And you had to draw the fluid out of a bottle.  And I remember I bent the needle the first time I tried it.  But anyway, I followed the instructions and gave this fellow a shot.  He says, did you give me a shot?  I didn't even feel it.  Which was a great encouragement. 

KAREN:  Yeah.  That's good. 

JOYCE:  So I was left with all of the names of the people that were to be immunized.  And they would come to my little kitchen, and that's that like I showed you over there. 

KAREN:  Yeah.  I would like to look at those pictures again, yeah. 

JOYCE:  And one time I had 14 people come all at once.  There wasn't room enough in the kitchen, which was our living room, to seat them all.  Some of them were seated on beds down through the hallway.  And I -- I had one syringe and three needles. 

KAREN:  Oh. 

JOYCE:  And if we had been taught about aspirating, we wouldn't have been able to do it. 

KAREN:  And now, what's aspirating? 

JOYCE:  To pull, draw back. 

KAREN:  Oh. 

JOYCE:  And there would have been the possibility of contaminating the fluids in it. 

KAREN:  I was going to ask, how did you do all those people with only three needles and didn't contaminate them?

JOYCE:  Okay.  I did do three, and then I washed the needles and put them on the stove in a pan and boiled them, and then do three more. 

KAREN:  Oh. 

JOYCE:  Very patiently they waited through the procedure, because that's the thing that happened any place they went. 

KAREN:  Yeah. 

JOYCE:  And gave all 14 of them their immunizations that afternoon. 

KAREN:  And what were you immunizing them for? 

JOYCE:  A whole variety of things.  Not always all at once, but we had typhoid on the list, for one. 

KAREN:  Oh. 

JOYCE:  And I don't know, the DPT, I don't remember just when we got the single dose of that.  I think we had to give some of those separately. 

KAREN:  Uh-hum. 

JOYCE:  But there were quite a number of things that we immunized people for. 

KAREN:  Measles and those kinds of things?  

JOYCE:  Didn't have measles yet. 

KAREN:  Oh. 

JOYCE:  Not then.  Later when I was health aide, it did. 

KAREN:  Now, what year was this again, when you were in Larsen Bay? 

JOYCE:  The year I started doing this was '54. 

KAREN:  Okay. 

JOYCE:  My baby was born in '53, and I -- I was trying to give him his first immunizations. 

KAREN:  And so at this point, how many children did you have? 

JOYCE:  We had the three when we went there, then Timmy was born that first year, so had four.  So went a year and I had one more.