A Whirlwind Week in Beautiful Palampur

COUNTRY: Palampur
PROGRAM: UniBreak
PROJECT: Flinders Speech Therapy
WRITTEN BY: Katie Cox

This week has been a bit of a whirlwind! We flew into New Delhi late Friday evening, had an overnight stay, and then made the thirteen-hour bus ride to Palampur. Indian roads are a bit interesting – no one cares much about lane markings, or which side of the road you should be on.

We had a beautiful first day in Palampur, exploring the area and taking lots of pictures of the mountains. We were jolted out of our lovely relaxation by the start of placement on Monday, which was a very new experience. We are spread between two schools for children with disabilities, with 6 speech pathology students at each.

The Rotary school has around forty-five school students. The first day was fairly intense – we picked an item out of the resource room and went to meet and assess our clients for the first time, running a session without knowing anything about them. We all coped though, and after the stressful first day we got into a bit more of a routine at our school.

The language barrier is difficult, but we’ve become very creative with gestures, writing and rephrasing. We’ve done our best to learn some Hindi, which has caused a lot of amusement on the part of the school’s staff and students, who take great delight in correcting our numerous mistakes.

One of the best parts of each day is group-time before lunch where all of the children come together and we run some activities. They are very energetic, very loud and very fun! They have definitely been the highlight so far. We’re looking forward to the rest of the placement!

Settling In To Working Life In Timor Leste

 COUNTRY: Timor-Leste
PROGRAM: UniBreak
PROJECT: Health Science
WRITTEN BY: Talita, Jocelyn and Alice - University of Queensland

Saturday
After an emotional morning farewell (Ruth didn’t believe we would get up for her – we love you Ruth!), the CNR bus arrived at our hotel for an adventure to Maubara. Little did we know, the treacherous nature of the roads that we would face in the 17 seater bus - the CNR staff played on our emotions as they encouraged us to get photos of the cliff that was less than a metre away. Despite this, they treated us to a fantastic day at the beach (pigs and all) as well as a wander through the local markets, an exhilarating 4WD competition and topped it off with a visit to Pope John Paul for sunset. We can’t move on without a massive shout out to Bec’s husband, Kane, who filled his carry-on for the weekend full of muesli bars and vegemite chocolate – you do not know what this means to us!

Sunday
We slept in. After an action packed few weeks, we revelled in the opportunity to relax for a bit and get some work done on the presentations that we are to present next week. We fit in a morning stroll to Santa Cruz cemetery – a sombre moment amongst the hustle and bustle as we gained a greater understanding of the sad history and suffering of the community.

Monday
The Occupational Therapy students had the opportunity to accompany the CNR Community Based Rehabilitation team staff to clients’ homes in the Dili region. This valuable experience provided a better understanding of the home environment of our clients to help guide our planning of therapy and goals. We were warmly welcomed into the homes, but it was a sad moment to learn that one of the clients does not leave her room due to disability and spends her days sitting. We recognised several areas in which therapy could help her and encouraged the CBR staff to get her to CNR for treatment. Monday night, it was time to break out the Vegemite chocolate, and to our surprise, it wasn’t half bad. At least it was almost as good as the mung bean muesli bars the Speechies decided were fabulous (definitely give these a go!).

Tuesday
Everyone is starting to relax and become more comfortable with each other, which is a good and bad thing. The good is that the teams are working well and we are becoming a fully functional IP team (/BFFs 4eva). The flip side is that pranks have started, and certain members of our team are one up, as another member returned home to find they could not reach their bed as their floor was covered in water filled saucepans. Retribution has not yet been received.

Wednesday
After a generally positive morning, we had an emotional afternoon. After giving a modified chopping board to a very grateful patient, we had a teary goodbye as she’d been treated at CNR for the last 5 years. This was followed by an upsetting realisation about the differences in medical treatments here compared to back home in Australia. A young teenager had a severely displaced femur that had not been operated on, and presented at CNR for physiotherapy. Unfortunately, the recommended management is surgery, and in the absence of that, there was very little we could do. This awakening to the reality of developing countries was upsetting to most, as it was probably the first scenario where we felt utterly helpless.

Thursday
Everyone was really upset that NSW didn’t win Origin, but had enjoyed the mid-week break at a restaurant watching the footy. The last clinic day for the week was spent working with clients and finalising the program for our presentations next week. The presentations revolve around areas of our professions that the staff at CNR had requested information about. These include: cerebral palsy, safe feeding, stages of play and gait retraining. We are very much looking forward to passing on this information in a more formal setting.

Friday
A district visit was again planned for today, where we attended a private NGO funded health clinic in Hera; a short drive East of Dili. We were taken through the clinic, and spoke to the Cuban doctor about the challenges he faces. Some of these challenges included the lack of resources, the isolation, the large number of people that he services (177 families), and the fact that whenever it rains and the river flows, they get flooded in. Paulo then took us to his composting centre, the first, and only, of its kind in Timor. Throughout the drive, we experienced our first attempted hitchhiker trying to join us in the mikrolet; the Timorese are very competent in stepping into moving vehicles.
Tonight will be a quite night as we prepare for our 60km, 6 hour journey to climb Mt Ramelau on Sunday morning.

Ho Chi Minh welcomes UniBreak volunteers

COUNTRY: Cambodia
PROGRAM: UniBreak
PROJECT:  Teaching and Mixed Health
WRITTEN BY: Melissa Muang

During our first night in Vietnam, our supervisor took us to eat traditional Vietnamese cuisine near our hotel. A dish that we had all tried was ‘Bun bo Hue’, which is a popular Vietnamese soup containing rice vermicelli and beef in extremely spicy broth (see photo below). As the majority of the group grew up eating Western cuisine, the spiciness and new flavours were a definite shock to our palettes. That being said, it was wonderful and only $3 too! After dinner, we were guided to our nearby laundromat for those of us who needed to clean our dirty garments. When we got there, it shocked us all to see how the Vietnamese did their washing. It involved hanging the washed garments onto a pole, which was then placed outside the second story window to dry (and for everyone to see!).

Another shock to the system was the amount of traffic on a Sunday night. It was pandemonium! There were hundreds of motorbikes travelling around on the streets, whizzing back and forth, in a state of harmonious chaos. As such, we always had significant trouble crossing the streets trying to avoid getting hit. We always had to be on our toes, as motorbikes would come out from unexpected directions, from small laneways, to turning into streets without warning, and sometimes even drive directly towards you. As you can imagine, we all initially hesitated to cross the road as it felt that there was a high likelihood of one of us getting hit. The tip we got from our supervisor was to 'cross when there was a small gap on the road and avoid hesitation'. Thus, one of the goals to achieve by the end of the work placement is to ‘cross a road in Vietnam without getting hit’.

On our first full day in Vietnam, we were taken around by a tour guide to explore Ho Chi Minh City. We got to see to different places, the Reunification Palace, the Historic Post Office, the War Remnants Museum, as well as many other historical buildings. The group also spent some time at the local Ben Thanh markets where we experienced first hand the hot and humid environment in which tourists try their best to snap up a bargain with locals vendors. After that, we stopped by a Vietnamese Coffee Shop, Trung Nguyen Café, which is the Vietnamese equivalent of Starbucks.

On our first day of placement, we left the hotel at 7am. No one knew what to expect or what we were going to be dealing with when we got there. On arrival, we were given the opportunity to meet the director. She allocated us to different age groups depending on what we studied. The standard work day commenced at 8am, with lunch at 11:30am, and nap time between 12pm and 2pm. What we found interesting was that naptime is actually a norm in the Vietnamese culture!

Our day ended at 5pm where our bus took us back to the hotel. Despite being so exhausted on our first day, we decided to treat ourselves by seeing a Vietnamese show at the Saigon Opera House. It was somewhat similar to Cirque De Soleil, but the acrobatic show incorporated elements of the Vietnamese culture, which was very insightful and enjoyable.

On reflection, my first week of work was very intense but inspiring. The centre took care of 250 abandoned children, ranging from newborn babies to 23+ year olds, who had illnesses from autism to cerebral palsy and hydrocephalus. On my first day of placement, there were a few times that I felt I was going to become overwhelmed with emotion. It was quite difficult to see children who were bed ridden, crying, and struggling with deformed limbs. I knew pretty soon that this was going to be a real eye opening experience. After the work placement, I found that it was definitely helpful to speak with the other students about their experiences and how they found it as well, as we were all in a bit of shock and somewhat overwhelmed by what we had seen.

The students in the first group are blind, so it was a massive help to have a fluent Vietnamese speaking student with us. The second group of students are girls who have experienced some form of abuse during their childhood. We work closely together with the both groups in their school homework. The Vietnamese student on our team was able to help them with geography, mathematics, biology, and chemistry. The other students were able to assist them with English. Overall, in the first week we felt that this was an emotional journey. We learnt lots about how to work the blind students and young girls. We need to be very gentle working with the girls at all time as they are very fragile.

Another huge challenge that we found as a collective group was communicating with the local populace. Due to the language barrier, it was difficult to converse. Having to work with children, our main way of communicating was through body language and hand signals. Simple words, such as "Xin Chao", which is 'hello' brought a smile to their faces and we felt like that suddenly helped us build a bond with them. As a social worker, I am currently working with students who are in primary school and assisting them with their maths homework every weekday when they finish school. So naturally, I have learnt how to say a few numbers from 1 to 10 in Vietnamese and have found it very helpful.

On the last day of work placement for the week, we were invited to a picnic with a number of the children. A public pool was rented out for a few hours to enable the children to splash around in the water with inflatable toys. After swimming, the children played soccer in the park with us. There were smiles all around and plenty of laughter. It was so heart-warming to see these children so happy, as they got to run around and enjoy the day. The morning ended with a lovely lunch by the water. We then headed back to the centre where the children got ready for their nap. As a group, we all enjoyed going to the picnic as it was a new experience and provided a different environment to interact with the children.

Before we knew it, it was the weekend. Some students decided to stay around Ho Chi Minh city, whilst others planned to catch a plane to Nha Trang (which is a beach), and Hue, or traverse on a 3-hour drive to Ho Tram. There is so much to see and do both in and out of the city centre. It is an understatement to say that we needed some rest and recreation after our long and busy first week! We will all return on Sunday night to prepare ourselves for a second week of work placement. We'll keep you posted!