A day in the life of a medical volunteer in Chitwan

COUNTRY: Nepal
PROGRAM: UniBreak
PROJECT: Medical Placement (Radiotherapy & Paramedicine)
WRITTEN BY: Thanh Vu

A standard day starts early in the morning, where our host family makes us breakfast. A milky rice-like breakfast is often served, and it tastes better than it sounds! Other times a serving of bread and jam is also given. With our complimentary tea and coffee that seems to be available 24/7, we are off to our respective placements by 7-8am.

There are eleven of us students on this trip; two are placed at the teaching community school to teach the kids English, six nursing students and one paramedicine student are placed at the local community hospital and two are placed at the cancer hospital.

Myself and another student are placed at the cancer hospital, which treats a patient load far larger than its limited staff should be dealing with. But they adapt and manage the stress exceptionally well. On the first day we were introduced to all the main doctors and heads of each sector; they were immensely welcoming and extremely friendly, encouraging us to exchange our procedures with theirs. Their head technologist said, "We are all students, constantly learning. You are a student, I am a student. We are all equal here." To myself and the other student, this was overwhelming, but in the best of ways.

For these first days we have just been observing the way the procedures are carried out. For the most part, the concepts and the procedures done are very much the same. Even the type of treatment units are the same back at home. We are all bouncing off ideas off each other, myself, the other student and the doctors and technologists, getting a grasp of how things are done. We have lunch in the canteen, which varies each day from the standard Dal bhat- a rice dish with some potato curry and a mixture of side dishes like picked radishes, to a spicy noodle dish.

After lunch we resume our observing and then make our way homes to our families, which is about a 5 minute walk for us and the teaching students, and 15 minute walk for the community hospital students.

After getting home, we spend time sitting outside, going for evening walks- in which we can see many buffalo, goats, chickens and pigs in the neighbourhood- playing with the kids, drinking plenty of tea and coffee, eating mandarins all the while struggling to understand the Nepali and English language, but we have the best laughs from it all.

Later on the families retire for the rest of the night or have a nightly praying session which includes reading from historic Hindu texts which is inevitably followed by lots of dancing and signing.