Case Notes:
Natalie Stebbing
(Nursing, India )

I was apprehensive about travelling to a country that I had no idea of other than Gandhi and curry, oh! And the Taj Mahal!  Work the World were great as they arranged my trip within about 6 weeks (I’m always last-minute).

I was given a full briefing over the phone by Omar, who gave me a feel for the place, what to expect and to throw all expectations to the wind and just embrace Indian life.  So I did.  After a slight co-electee plane fiasco (we were in fact not on the same plane, nor even at the same airport!) we met up in Qatar and arrived together in Kerala.  Having been taken back to the House by the Work the World local staff we were given a twilight tour of Trivandrum and taken out for dinner.

The WtW house was ace, really big, and spacious and with western toilets (there are some things a girl just can’t give up!).  Our cook was a sweetie and we were dining on fish molley (it tastes nicer than it sounds) and coconut pancakes galore.  During my time there, Dave the “in the field” WtW man came to visit to check everything was ok.  He was great company and made the whole organisation feel miles more personal than other big “Gap” organisations.  This was helped along by daily yoga sessions, evening Bollywood movies and impromptu rooftop BBQs.

My placement in a private hospital (Govindan’s) on their labour ward allowed me to see a side of healthcare that adult nurses largely miss out on back home, and although the language barrier was sometimes hard, I forged some strong relationships with the nursing staff – them laughing at my “yellow hair, why so short, you like a boy!”, to my long chats with a young nurse caught in a cultural and religious impasse of Catholicism versus Hinduism with her secret boyfriend.

The highlights most definitely were being invited, and also dressed up, for a Hindu wedding ceremony, the sweet scent of jasmine flowers wafting from every corner and lunch eaten off a banana leaf; helping to deliver my first baby and giving him to the family; baby elephants; and, of course, the joys of trying to perfect the head wobble…..you’ll have to go to find out what that one’s all about!

I’m sure my experience away helped me gain a place on a Midwifery conversion course starting this September…Enjoy!”