We moved to here because with our lack of nursing skills, Nancye and I found that we aren't super helpful in a nursing clinic. And not so many people with disabilities were coming to the clinic as we expected.
The VIC was much more fitting with our experiences and busy!
There are a couple of dorms where people from out of town can come and stay. It seems people stay for around 3 weeks, then head home for a couple of weeks "holiday" and if need be come back.
The centre is pretty varied. They seem to see a lot of kids with torticollis or club foot. Lots of Spinal cord injuries (one from a bike accident, one who fell off a house and one who got shot in the spine by police while walking home from university, past a protest). Quite a lot of prosthetic leg making, some from mines, some from bike accidents, plus remaking them as people need new ones.
So we got shown around and introduced to everyone, then shown to a person. The physios here all talk at least reasonable English. But the difficulty is that they are all always busy with their own patients and not really able to translate for more then 30 seconds at a time. So there was a lot of smiling, and pointing at myself saying Lucy, pointing at the child and trying to guess how to pronounce their name. Luckily for us the notes are written in English and a lot of the people we saw had been seen by a previous volunteer from America.
The interesting thing to see it that the physio's seem to have very very specific areas of speciality. Like, rather than specialising in paediatrics - specialising in clubfoot only. So there seem to be a lot of gaps for people who don't fit into one of those categories.
some of our highlights:
Organising Heung to have a splint for eating made. Heung had a traffic accident and now has incomplete spinal cord injury making him a quadriplegic. Before we got this he was using both hands to try to hold a built up fork and scoop at rice. We didn't actually see any go into his mouth so in practice I don't think he ever actually tried to feed himself - just had family do it for him. with the splint he can get the spoon in his mouth with one arm (sometimes using the other for support). He had a really beautiful smile on his face once he got the splint working (it probably wasn't until then that he actually worked out what the heck we were all doing! We weren't able to remove the spoon from this. So we made a second one that he can use while he practices writing, using his phone etc.Seeing a little girl come back two days after her initial appointment....
Initially we were told that she has CP. But when we did the initial assessment it didn't seem like she actually has any diagnosis. At 1 year old she isn't standing or walking and her parents are getting worried. she can sit perfectly well (great posture actually) when placed in sitting. But refuses to stand. My diagnosis...... not tummy time. This kid started screaming when she was put on her tummy, even when she laid on Mums chest. Every time she cried or screamed she got picked up again. We tried to explain that she is crying because it is new, and hard and she isn't actually getting hurt (so leave her there!) but we weren't really sure how much got translated, or whether the parents would let her cry. Two days later she comes back. We actually didn't recognise her because when we looked over she was lying on he tummy playing happily. Amazing! Unfortunately most of the young kids were scared of us weird white people and would cry if we picked them up, touched them or sometimes - looked at them too long! This little girl was definitely in that category! So we had to use a teddy bear to demonstrate to mum how to help her roll over, or sit up by herself. Mum did really well, but it is so much harder without being allowed to touch the child. And without being able to speak the language!
It was a pity that we only saw her for the first time at the very end of our trip. I think if we had been able to see her more than twice she would have gotten use to us (we kind of got a smile out of her towards the end!) and we would have had her crawling! She picked up new skills so fast once she got tummy time!
The even more rewarding part of that session and trying to explain to the physio translator how very very important being on tummy is for babies came later that day. We weren't really sure if the physio understood what we were trying to explain about the importance, but then later thast day I looked over and saw him with a little baby on it's tummy. He was looking at how well it could hold it's head up, and even using a rattle to entice it to look. That was great! Hopefully they will continue to fight the tummy time fight. I think culturally here kids don't spend enough time just being on the floor, rolling around or whatever. Every time I go past a house and notice babies they are carried, or in a hammock.
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