Itinerary!

April 12-13

Hello friends near and far,

We (Marella, Krista, Kristi and Cathy) are very excited to be sharing our experiences in Nepal with you through this blog. As many of you know UBC Midwifery students have been doing clinical placements abroad in low resource countries for over 10 years now. Marella and Cathy arrived in Nepal late April 12 and Krista and Kristi will join us May 3. Over the next few weeks, I (Marella) will keep you informed of our experiences and K + K will help me once they arrive! I have opted to go for 9 weeks instead of 6 weeks to add a research component to my experience. Below is a brief outline of where we think we might be in the next 9 weeks!

At the beginning of our trip Cathy, Jill, a researcher from Memorial University, representatives from our Nepal partner Midwifery Society of Nepal (MIDSON) and I will go to Mugu, a very remote part of Nepal, to do focus groups with community members and interviews with healthcare workers on birth preparedness. This research will engage the community to explore local perceptions of what is needed to support safer births as Nepal develops its services.  Through participatory action research we will invite community groups and care providers to talk about birth practices and the care available to women, how women and their families make decisions about birth and the ways that communities can work together to improve access to culturally appropriate care at the time of delivery and in the postpartum period. For my part, I will help with the interviews and focus groups, teaching birth skills workshops and helping with birth centre assessment in 2 villages we will walk to (2 and 6 hrs away from Gamghadi, Mugu, where we land). In the next few days we will prepare to teach 2-3 days of workshops for the Auxiliary Nurse Midwives (ANMs) who provide maternity services in the area. We will be ready for many topics and ask them what they would like to do when we arrive! The workshops will be hands on and we will use teaching mannequins that we have brought with us donated kindly from the Midwifery Association of BC (MABC), our community donors and some that our partner here, MIDSON, have. It sounds like our flight is booked for April 20 - April 30 so you won't hear from us during that time.

When we return to Kathmandu we will meet Kristi and Krista. We then have the privilege of spending International Day of the Midwife on May 5th at a Midwifery conference. We are all excited about this opportunity and that we are so fortunate to be able to meet all of the midwives and allies who are working hard to regulate midwifery in Nepal. Yes you read that right. Nepal does not currently have regulated midwifery! Many people, including us, feel that midwives are in the best position to provide care for Nepalese women given their speciality in providing care in a low resource setting and their skills in knowing who to refer to a higher level of care. We hope that our time here will be in some small way a support to Nepalese midwives as they try and realize this goal.

After the conference we will head to Dhaulagari Zonal Hospital, a rural hospital in Baglung. The students last year had a wonderful placement here, although it was cut short because of the devastating earthquakes. We are thrilled to have been invited back this year. In Baglung we will work with local maternity care providers and share our skills. We will bring with us much needed teaching materials and will run trainings on midwifery skills like normal delivery, birth positions, neonatal resuscitation and management of postpartum hemorrhage and other emergencies. They will teach us about how they do birth in their low resource settings. We will leave the trainers and materials for teaching workshops so that they are then able to share the trainings with other birth attendants. We will be here 3-4 weeks.

After this Cathy will head to Uganda and we will spend our remaining time In Kathmandu, perhaps with a mini trek in the Annapurna or lower Mustang region before we head back. I am going to sign off here for now. I have been writing this post over the past few days due to jet lag and the patchy internet and I fear I will just keep adding as I have new experiences! Watch for a post about my first few days in Nepal soon! Looking forward to sharing our adventure with you all!