[This week, Trustees' Week, is a week dedicated to the work of our unpaid volunteer trustees who use their skills and experience to set and help meet MCFB's strategy and objectives. In the first of a series of blogs from our trustees, we hear from the Chair of our Board, Wendy Paterson.]

The U.K. lockdown was a hard and strange experience for me. It was a situation that I’ve never found myself in before. As the doors to freedom were closed by force,  all I had was my house. These four walls would be my safety, my security and what I would end up seeing more than anything else. I had to make the most of it. This is how I survived. I had no choice but to get used to it, live with it. I decided I might as well make the most of it and at least try to be as positive as possible.

We asked two students to talk about their experiences of being on placement at MCFB during a global pandemic.

Kamal

“My name is E. I found out I was pregnant when I was in Romania. When I went back to Edinburgh it was a little hard because I didn’t have a place to stay, but it was a beautiful life experience because I found out I was pregnant. It was very hard at first because I used to live in the hotel where I worked. I went to stay with my brother-in-law after being pregnant for 5 months. From the first month when I found out that I was pregnant, I had nausea and was vomiting. Because I didn’t have a fixed address, I wasn’t registered with a GP so it took time before I could have a scan.

Lockdown was put in place at probably the busiest time of the year for MCFB. Up until then, our offices on Coburg Street had been a hive of activity: we had around 15 social work students on placement, phone calls to answer, meetings to attend, visits from parents and children and after school group activities to run. With the promise of better weather, we were beginning to think about venturing outdoors and planning summer barbecues, we were holding regular supervision sessions with our students and visiting families in their homes.