Menu Bar

Monday, December 9, 2013

Introducing the 2014 IHI team!


The 2014 IHI, all girls, team is (left to right):



Rebecca -  2nd year Compressed Time Frame nursing student
Pallavi -  2nd year medical student
Mariah -  3rd year nursing student
Jelena -  3rd year nursing student

Next summer we will be traveling to India to share our skills, experiences, and financial contributions with Families for Children and Amar Seva Sangam; two NGO’s well known to the IHI community. 

We are very humbled and excited to have been selected to be a part of the IHI legacy (~THANK YOU 2013 team!!~), and look forward to the new adventures this journey will bring us. 

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Now taking applications for the 2014 team

The applications for the 2014 India Health Initiative team are now available!

Download the application form here, and email it to indiahealth@gmail.com by October 18 to be considered for next year's India Health Initiative team.  Best of luck,

The 2013 IHI Team,

Courtney Lindsay
Jenn Sironi
Randy McVeigh
Sonika Kainth
Jody Chan

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Kerala and beyond

Following our time at Families for Children, we unwound with a relaxing day on a Kerala houseboat.  This was like exploring a tropical paradise, and was an instant classic in the India highlight reel.  We then spent 2 days packing in the tourist sites of the Kerala coast and the old city of Fort Kochi.  On July 31, after 41 days of travelling together, we split up and continued our India adventures separately!  We had an unforgettable time together, and have many stories.  We will reconvene in London in September to begin to choose next year's team.

See you, FFC!

The IHI team has completed our time at FFC!  

We were welcomed by the staff at FFC and were impressed by the hospitality that they provided for us.  We had an amazing time with the children and adults here.  We busied ourselves with a number of activities.    

Randy spent most of his time with the extra special care group (people of various ages with little or no speech, and highly impaired in functioning, typically due to cerebral palsey or polio), and providing wheelchair training and practice to a group of special care patients who were attending a vocational program.  

Courtney, Jenn and Sonika joined the nurses and doctor on rounds, and spent a great deal of time with the pre-school and school-aged children, and the "big babies".  They spent time with kids with disabilities and some without, entertaining them with song, dance, bubbles, crafts, and tattoos.    

FFC has been growing and evolving their services in recent years, and Mukil, the sole physio on staff there, deserves many kudos for improving the services for children there, in terms of posture, seating and handling.  The team at FFC were very open to the input of volunteers, and have adopted many recommendations from healthcare volunteers from abroad in recent years.  Their welcoming attitude made it a pleasure to share our knowledge there, and learn from them.  

We all leave with unshakeable memories of the patients and staff at FFC.

Friday, July 26, 2013

Madurai

We took a 4-day diversion to Madurai, the city that Lonely Planet calls the soul of Tamil Nadu.  Why?  Temples.  Madurai is one of the oldest cities in India, and has some of the most important temples.  The Shri Meenakshi is considered just as important to the south, in terms of architectural style, as the Taj Mahal is to the north.  Our hotel was near the Shri Meenakshi,  and we explored its depths one evening.  Because it was completed over the span of six centuries (11th to 17th), we found many styles of architecture inside.  Every painting, sculpture, and dimension of the temple has meaning to Hindu pilgrims.  Between ceiling art and the thousand pillar statues, and praying Hindus, there was so much complexity inside, our eyes didn't know where to look.  Until, that is, Courtney spotted an elephant and made one of her Madurai dreams come true.  We were all blessed by this creature, with a pat on the head from its trunk.  

Another night, we took a rickshaw south and checked out the Tirupperangundam temple.  While not as impressive in scale as the Shri Meenakshi, the setting was memorable as it was built into the side of a mountain, and some of the statues were carved directly into cave rock.  We were there during prayer time, and saw a group of Hindus making fervent offerings to each deity in the temple.  On the rickshaw ride back from temple, we were stuck in a line of traffic when we saw a large crowd of men running on the street, towing a shrine behind them.  Suddenly, a mass of white fireworks began erupting on the street, as people scattered from within.  We watched silently as this continued for about 20 second and seemed to slowly advance down the uncoming lanes, then fizzled out.  As we drove through the smoke, the occasional straggling firework blew off.  Weeks into our stay, India continues to surprise us.  

We visited a Gandhi museum one afternoon.  Inside, we read about the dehumanizing suppression of India by Britain, two centuries worth of violent uprising, and how, in the end, Gandhi led the country in a successful non-violent campaign for independence.  We also laid eyes on the bloodied dohti that Gandhi was wearing when he was assassinated.  

Madurai is a nice, in-between sized city, which feels like raw India gut with a fair bit of tourist infrastructure.  We all grew more comfortable navigating the streets and discovering neighbourhoods.  We all found deals in the markets.  We developed favourite restaurants.  Randy received a bizarre head massage.  The rubbing, pulling and vigorous chopping felt suspiciously like martial arts. 

We went to Thirumalai Nayakar Mahal (palace), the home of the Nayak dynasty of the 14th Century.  Two of us were innocent victims of pidgeons in this palace.  Did that happen to the kings and queens of old, or did their servants shield the tops of their heads?  We can not know.    

We left our hotel with our suitcases balanced on the roof of a rickshaw. We left the city on the wrong sleeper car of an overnight train.  The latter mistake we correct at 3 AM by hurrying down the platform of the first station stop, laden with too many bags, and evicting the people who we found asleep in our beds).  All told, Madurai was an unforgettable experience.