Kanti Children's Hospital

July
My volunteer placement in Kathmandu is at Kanti Children’s Hospital.
Kanti is a government-funded institiution, which is one of the major teaching hospitals in Nepal (the other being aptly called Teaching Hospital, which is located in the building next door). I’m not sure what I really expected Kanti to be like. Having never been in a developing country I tried to stir away from forming too many preconceptions of my new working environment - and of those that did form I had very low expectations of what was to come. As such I was relatively pleasantly surprised by the conditions at Kanti. Yes, most part of the hospital smelled heavily of urine and excrements, the patient rooms were overcrowded, and equipments and instruments all looked ancient, but conditions were better than I had hoped!

Being a teaching hospital, Kanti sees its fair share of foreign medical students coming to complete an elective as part of their studies. Thus one of our – there are two of us doing a placement at Kanti - biggest struggle from the get-go was to differentiate ourselves as volunteers here to help and not medical students here to just pass a course. Unfortunately our coordinator at the hospital, Bishop, is the one who oversees foreign medical electives so a volunteer placement at Kanti can easily resemble a medical elective. For example during our first week in the Medical Ward we spend most of our morning doing rounds with the staff physicians along with Nepali and foreign medical students. Since we’re very limited in our Nepali skills, there isn’t much we can do but observe. We start at about 10am and rounds finish around noon. Most students take-off after that, but most volunteers in the past have taken the afternoon to spend time with the patients and work on projects that they’ve created. Thus the onus is really on us to be proactive to seek out areas where we can contribute and help. One of the wonderful things about working in the developing world is that there is a lot less bureaucratic red tape. To make changes in the hospital requires someone to take charge and see it through. There’s no need to go through ten different boards to get various approvals, or endless protocol to follow, someone just need to spearhead it. I’m not sure what my project will be, but it sounds like proper handwashing education may be an area to pursue.

Before taking on this placement I was repeatedly warned about the potential frustrations and limitations I would face. Kanti isn’t a place with defined areas of need; you really have to look for them. The staffs are glad to have people here to help, but they’re not too sure where we can help most of the time. At this point I’m really not sure what will happen over the next few weeks. On the one hand it really is too early to judge, but because my time here is so short I feel an overwhelming sense of urgency to figure out exactly where I can contribute.