Friday 21 August 2009

Week 1

So I have 9 minutes to try and sum up all that has happened this week, which blatantly isn't possible! It's been an amazing week and already I feel like we've been here forever but at the same time I'm looking forward to feeling a bit more settled and at home than I do. We live in a fairly touristy part of Kathmandu (Look up Patan Durbar Square- we're 5 mins walk from there) but it's quite well connected to the rest of the city and we've had some limited experience of public transport on local buses to work!

The centre we're working in is really nice- a lot better equipped and more 'shiny' than I expected, especially compared to everywhere else in Nepal as far as I can see! The people there are lovely and yesterday we discovered they have a qualified Nepali SLT working there which no-one had thought to tell us, but is a good thing because we have something to work with now! We're still not entirely sure wht our role will be but hopefully that will come out in the next week, we've just been observing really this week.

Another great thing about the centre is that it's out of the city- the roads are so polluted you can taste the fumes in your mouth all the time- but SGCP is in the hills a bit so it's much nicer. We do have the BEST VIEW from our house though- it's about 5 stories high and has a flat roof from which you can see all the moutains that surround the city- on a clear day its beautiful and on a clear night (expecially in a power cut) the stars are immense.

Time's up- gotta go!
Becca

Sunday 2 August 2009

Welcome!!

Hi!

On 15th August, Ellie and I will be flying out of Heathrow off on an adventure to Nepal, bringing speech and language therapy to a charity called SGCP: Self-help Group for Cerebral Palsy. We will be joining two physios from Leeds Met who are flying out this week, and staying for 3 months, offering whatever help and support we can.

This blog will hopefully record some of our adventures while we are away. Hopefully they'll be better written than this, but the first entry is always pretty hard, and it's especially hard when we haven't even gone yet. So far we have abseiled off buildings to raise money for the charity, graduated from the course (a key part) and booked flights and accomodation. We've done some research around the charity and I've visited a local specialist school working with a large CP caseload to get some ideas and advice, but I get the sense that nothing can really prepare us for what we will find when we arrive, and until then, all we can do is wait...