Medicine & Physiotherapy - NEPAL Daily Life

Life of a Medicine Volunteer in Nepal

I'm staying with a Nepalese family and two other volunteers in a village called Banepa on the edge of the Kathmandu valley, while working at the Hospital and Rehabilitation centre for Disabled Children (HRDC) during the week.

My average day begins at 7.15 when I get out of bed and have a shower under a tap at waist height. The water is usually warm, but if it is a cloudy day the solar panels don't soak up enough sun and I have to face a cold shower - sometimes I prefer to just smell instead! We have breakfast at 7.45 - Nepali doughnuts and eggy bread - very tasty, and Nepali tea - spicy tea either black or with milk. For lunch and dinner we have Dal Bhat - rice and lentils, with spicy vegetables, eaten with our fingers; I've heard it can lose its appeal after several months of continuous consumption, but at the moment, I like it! The other volunteers are very friendly and have helped me settle in really quickly. We walk from our house in Banepa through the rice fields and up the hill to HRDC each morning, which takes about half an hour. If we're feeling energetic we race up the hill, although this inevitably ends with us all collapsing in a heap at the top!

On a normal day we join the morning ward round, mostly conducted in English, and are able to ask questions about the patients as we move around the wards. On arriving at HRDC for the first time I was given a loose timetable to suggest where I might spend mornings during the week; rotating from outpatients to physio, the operating theatre, the lab, x-ray, sterile room (preparing materials for operations), and the workshop (constructing crutches, bamboo frames and replacement limbs). There are so many orthopaedic problems here that I've never heard of in England. Most of them are diet related, such as 'clubfoot' - where the bones in the foot have fused and grown incorrectly, causing the patient to walk on the outside edge of the foot. I've already seen a lot of children with this problem, which is correctable by plastering the legs and feet in the correct position when the child is younger than 2 years old. However in older children the foot loses its flexibility and surgery is the only option. I have plastered a few babies in the physio department who have clubfoot - my very first one was possibly the wriggliest baby in the whole world - it took two of us to hold him still while the plaster set, and even then he kept squirming free of our grip! In the afternoons we play with the children in the 'soft room', helping them learn English, while we struggle to learn a few words of Nepali. They find it very entertaining to hear our efforts at conversation in Nepali; we invariably resort to miming!

At the weekends the girls and I come into Kathmandu to meet up with other volunteers from different placements, and to eat some food that isn't Dal Bhat! It is about a one hour bus drive from Banepa if we get the hospital bus because it doesn't need to stop at the checkpoints, but the other buses do have to stop and everyone has to get out and prove they aren't a Maoist with their identity cards - so the same journey on a normal bus can take up to 2 hours.

And on Monday, its back to the HRDC.