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Published: August 4th 2013
Today was my last day volunteering at the hospital. I'm fine with that though because I feel that I've exhausted what I can learn from this experience. Again not too much happened today. Dr. X spent much of the morning quizzing us on random facts and also asked us some relevant medical questions. It was just us U of T students in there today though, and since we've really only studied normal anatomy and physiology up until now, it was hard for any of us to answer his questions. He must have thought we were pretty dumb, but at U of T we learn all pathology in 2nd year.
Now that we got back from our trek, I wanted to spend the last four days starting up another project I was supposed to be working on, and that someone will continue for the rest of the summer. I was supposed to be working on a project to help out the nutrition centre at the hospital. The nutrition centre is in the guesthouse at the hospital (downstairs from the organization's volunteer office) and its where they send undernourished children to get better. The program includes feeding the children high caloric meals,taking
care of their medical problems and educating the parents about proper nutrition for their babies. Families that are usually sent to the nutrition centre are usually poor and can't pay, so the cost of running the centre is expensive because it doesn't bring in any money. Since the centre is in another building, it also costs rent, plus Dr. X has to pay a doctor, nurse, dietician and others to staff it. He figures it costs him about $1500 a month which he can't really afford, but it's important so he does it anyways.
So since our hospital-based infection surveillance project didn't really work out, I thought I'd get started on the nutrition one instead. I had asked him about it two weeks ago, but he told me there were nursing students staying in there right now so they only had space for 1 baby. The students were also staying in the playroom. This seems absurd to me; I can't imagine that these nursing students are more important than malnourished babies, but hey "Welcome to Nepal". So anyways he seemed like he didn't have that much control over it because he told me that they had told him only
a few more days. When I asked again it was a few more days. Ugh. So I left it until after the trek and then I asked him again on Sunday when I got back. He told me yes that the students had left and the centre was being cleaned. I thought this was great news. Monday it was also being cleaned. Ok.... On Tuesday my classmate, Laura arrived in Nepal and she will be taking over the project, so we thought we'd go have a look at it together. When we get there we find that nursing students are still staying there!!!' Now I'm greatly confused and frustrated. His English is pretty good so I'm sure I didn't misunderstand. In any case, there's not a whole lot we could do. We looked at the kitchen, the one room that was not occupied by the students, and tried to peak into the playroom but the students shut the door on us. This just seems so backward to let students take over part of the hospital, but I guess c'est la vie.
Anyways, at lunch we went to a restaurant close to the hospital called Downtown. It's a really good
Inside SERC School
The volunteers painted these murals. The kitchen is at the end of the hallwayrestaurant and dr. X took us volunteers there a few weeks ago when the Ottawa guys arrived. Today was really the first time I felt the language barrier. The restaurant is far from the tourist area so it makes sense that there's less English, but they have an English menu so we should be able to at least point to things! We ordered a bunch of things, but they got our chicken masala wrong... They gave us sweet and sour chicken instead! Then we went to go order extra naan, so we pointed at our naan and said one more and showed one finger indicating one. The guy (who is actually probably about 13) said ok and then went away. But the naan never came and he brought the bill a bit later. Strange he didn't even try to understand gestures. Ohwell, it happens! I should have brought my phrase book, but I hadn't needed it here at all until now.
In the afternoon, a bunch of us headed over to the rehab centre (called SERC) that the Ottawa guys are at, to help them paint. Elysia has been wanting to go there for awhile just to check out
their program and see the rehab facilities, and this was the perfect opportunity to do that and help out! Erik had told Elysia that the staff there had hoped that they would paint the kitchen, but they were all busy doing murals of angry birds in the entrance so didn't think they had the time. So we offered to help out and paint it for them! This was good for Elysia because she missed out on the last painting session because she was sick.
When we got there and saw what we were dealing with, I think it took us all a bit by surprise. Mike was coming to help too but he hadn't arrived yet. The kitchen was definitely not a room that any of us would think about cooking in. We'd more likely store our lawnmowers and shovels there instead. To be completely honest, it was really dirty. The cupboards were originally white, but very black because of the dirt. Paint was chipping off the cement walls. Everything was just very dirty. The room was also very dark too. These things are good to see because it shows us the different standards of living of people, and
Before picture
Yes, this is a kitchen. A place where food is cooked. For children. how we can be such clean freaks sometime. Anyways, we knew that no matter what we did, the kitchen would look better after we were done!
None of us are expert painters, but the room was so dark you could never tell. They wanted the walls to be painted pink and the cupboards dark brown so that dirt would be hidden. This would definitely not be my choice of colours, but this was their place. We had a lot of fun painting the walls. Some of the girls didn't bring a change of clothes so they flipped their clothes inside out in hopes they didn't get too dirty. By the end there were 7 of us working on the little space. It only took us a few hours to complete it. When we were done, the kitchen did look a lot better and cleaner (although it really wasn't). It would have been nice to paint it a more modern colour but ohwell! We really enjoyed it because it gave us a chance to make a lasting difference to the school, something that they'd really appreciate and would help them out a lot. For Elysia, because her projects didn't really
pan out as expected, she felt that this was a chance to actually get something done and leave her mark in nepal. It was a great day! The next day the cooking staff was so appreciative of the kitchen's new colours that they apparently started asking for new things for the kitchen, to keep it looking good. We obviously made a great difference to them.
I just want to write a bit about the rehab centre in general since I'm interested in rehab. It wasn't my project so I don't know that much about it, but these are my impressions:
I was really impressed by the facilities at SERC. It's more of a rehab program where children with developmental and physical disabilities go for the day and can get an education. They have many different classes depending on the child's intelligence level. They have a bunch of classrooms on the main floor and outside in another building, and then upstairs they have a physio room and a room for speech therapy and sensory therapy. They have 80 children that are in the program and 25 of them are orphans. You can imagine that a poor nepali family might choose
to abandon a child who has special needs because either they don't understand the condition and/or they can't pay for it. The orphans and some other children that their parents can't take care of, live in a something like a group home nearby. One of the directors of the program explained to me that it's not like the group homes we're used to in North America. It's just basically housing with a nurse that comes to check on them, but there are no organized activities at all and the kids pretty much stay in their own rooms. So sad. Because I'm interested in rehab medicine, I was asking about what doctors these children see. I guess outside of their general paediatrician or family doc (which we have discovered they don't really have here- most patients just show up at the outpatient department at the hospitals when they are sick), there are no doctors that oversee their rehab, or that help them improve their functioning as a result of their condition. They just have physiotherapists and other rehab professionals, but no doctor that helps them through their condition or really helps them manage it. I was explained that rehab program is
Primer First
Order of operations: Prime, scrape, re-prime, paint. very unique in nepal. A place where children can get an education but can be accommodated based on their needs. The director told me that there are no special education training programs in nepal (this shows how unimportant they believe it to be), so she had recruited someone who had been trained in India to help with the education aspect of their program. It seems to me that things are now changing for the better- society is gradually starting to include people with disabilities and try to be more accommodating. This can happen with the help of programs like this. The other thing that I thought was really good was the fact that they do some job training with these kids (the more capable ones), to help them develop skills to provide for themselves. One girl's father owns a tea shop, so they have taught her how to make tea and her task each day is to bring everyone tea. The hopes is that one day she will be able to work in her father's shop. Anyways, I was really fascinated by this school and I'm really impressed with the amount of equipment that they have (on such little resources)
and how they're making such a difference. Things to think about for the future.
After we were finished painting, 5 of us crammed into a cab and we headed back to Thamel for dinner. People here don't really care about seatbelts (cabbies don't have them in the back), so this is a normally practice to have more than the normal amount of people in there. The only law is that the driver has to wear a seatbelt- i guess passengers are not as important. (Even motorbikes, only the first person is required to wear a helmet by law- scary!) As we were driving we came very close to hitting a cow. Only in nepal do people narrowly avoid accidents with cows.
That night, we went back to the KToo steakhouse in Thamel. It was sooo good! I just love their fajitas and deep fried banana momos (momos are just like Chinese dumplings- Nepali favourite).
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