Where can you find hollering street vendors, chattering shoppers, cups of chai, crispy samosas, and crazy auto-rickshaw drivers weaving around hundreds of sauntering cows? Why, in India, of course! This past winter, three of us second year UBC MPT students, ventured to India in hopes of experiencing the vastly different culture and learning about health care in foreign rural areas.
We decided to skip out on Christmas break to travel, so we boarded Flight 582 to Delhi and toured the state of Rajasthan for two weeks. After many wonderful and some not-so-wonderful experiences, we flew down to Bangalore to meet Hilary Crowley, a pediatric physiotherapist from Prince George. We all took an overnight train to the city of Koppal, and were brought to the lovely Samuha Samarthya campus (Samuha = gathering of people, Samarthya = ability) – our home for the next five weeks. For the duration of our placement, we were paired up with local community-based rehabilitation (CBR) workers, and we rode down dusty roads on the backs of motorbikes to small pockets of villages in the district of Koppal. Each of us was assigned a caseload of 6-7 patients, with diagnoses ranging in variety from pediatric disabilities to adult strokes to spinal cord injuries. The learning curve was steep; we had to assess, treat, and educate the patients and their families on conditions that we learned about but perhaps had not seen to this extent. For example there was a 15-year-old boy with cerebral palsey and extensive contractures who had never had therapy before; a 60-yearold man with progressed tuberculosis that affected his spine and resulted in below-waist paralysis; and a 5-year-old boy with spina bifida, who had a lump the size of half a grapefruit.Where can you find hollering street vendors, chattering shoppers, cups of chai, crispy samosas, and crazy auto-rickshaw drivers weaving around hundreds of sauntering cows? Why, in India, of course! This past winter, three of us second year UBC MPT students, ventured to India in hopes of experiencing the vastly different culture and learning about health care in foreign rural areas.
As we departed, we consolidated the many lessons into several take-home messages. Firstly, we realized how extremely blessed we are to live in a country that has a system in place to care for our disabled. Secondly, we learned that factors such as poverty, family dynamics, low education levels, and cultural norms have enormous impacts on general health as well as the delivery of the health care. Lastly, this experience has reinforced the fact that education IS empowerment – with the few tidbits we could give to families, we greatly changed the level of care that they could provide for those around them. All in all, we feel very grateful for our opportunity to work and travel in India, and would highly recommend this experience to anyone.
Andrea Mendoza
Jamie Burniston
Ryan Hik