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Thursday Apr 28, 2011

Fail to prepare...

Flights booked? Check. Visa? Check. Sturdy pair of flip-flops? Check. My necessary trawl through essential travel preparation is well underway. On the near horizon, though, is the now customary charade of visiting the travel nurse. Each visit I stroll in, inform the nurse I'm travelling to Ghana and that I'll be needing a prescription for malaria tablets and whatever boosters are due since my last trip. The nurse will then turn to her computer, look up the details for Ghana and select the right inoculations. She'll produce the injection, turn to me and will probably say something like "Are you ok with needles?" I'll then look at her straight in the eye and lie "Yea, no problem."

Now, I'm no great fan of injections for the reason that someone stabbing me in the arm and sending a mystery fluid round my body doesn't particularly enthuse me. So I'll turn to the face away from my arm and get on with though as it needs to happen – I'm also not sure what I would gain from saying that actually, no, I'm not OK with needles. Does the nurse then turn from me, put the offending item back where it came from and say "OK then, I'll just pop this away and we'll say no more about it then"? I thought not.

 

However this visit is one of the last tasks I have to complete before I should be ready to go. But is preparation to volunteer overseas just a case of ticking the boxes that are needed to enter the country? Probably not is the answer that most people would give after giving it a little thought.

 

On the one hand you might argue that it's extremely difficult to prepare for situations that you haven't encountered before. Similarly, you might be inclined to suggest that there inevitably has to be a bedding in period after you arrive before you're ready to really throw yourself into your project. Both of these may be true to some extent, but there are a few things that you can do make sure you are as fully prepared as possible before you begin your volunteer experience.

 

Have you gained as much information from the organisation about both their structure and the projects you'll be working on? Do you have a clear picture of what will be expected of you from your host organisation? Do you yourself have a strong idea of what it is you would like to do?

 

At Dave Squared we try to provide volunteers with information on both our organisation and have produced a volunteer/role specification to try and answer as many of the volunteer's questions as possible. Everyone has their own issues that spring to mind though and volunteers shouldn't worry about getting in contact with the appropriate people to find out more information.

 

        Even with this information it may be hard to plan your activities down to the smallest detail, but you can ask yourself a couple of fairly broad questions pre departure:

        1. What are my strengths and how can they contribute to the project?

        2. What do I want to achieve whilst volunteering?

 

This gives you something to refer during your trip: Are your skills being utilised? Are you achieving what you set out to achieve? If the answer to any of these is no then it is beneficial for both yourself and the organisation that it is fed back to your project leader.

 

From a Dave Squared perspective we've come up with 3 goals that we want to work on over the summer to help support our overall objectives:

        1. Consolidate the support we give to our existing projects

        2. Increase the scope for the number/type of projects we work with

        3. Increase the number of relationships we have with other organisations with common goals

 

As mentioned above we'll review these regularly to ensure that they are being fulfilled, and if not then steps will be taken to remedy this.

 

So despite all the stress and hassle of making sure you're stocked up on flip-flops, sun cream and bug repellent, the most important pre departure tasks you might undertake is to just think about those few key questions. For me though, the task of overcoming the travel nurse is still to come...     

Posted by David ( 9:20 AM )
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Friday Apr 08, 2011

Ghana

Hi, my name's Dave, one of two founding members of UK registered charity Dave Squared Volunteering. From the end of May I'll be spending 4 months in Ghana helping to plan and oversee the activities of our volunteers and the programmes that they will be working on over the summer.

But first, a quick bit of background info for you: Dave Squared was set up after myself and Dave Coles (the other founding member) volunteered together in Ghana with another charity back in 2006. After travelling back in 2008 to witness the African Cup of Nations we decided to start our own organisation in order to fulfil our own specific goals for development in Ghana. Registered charity status was gained last December and we now work under the mission of ensuring that the people of the Volta Region, in Ghana, can fulfil their potential and have every opportunity to succeed. We focus on the promotion of education and physical activity to do this and use a mixture of grants and volunteers to achieve our mission.

We currently work with local schools to help with their teaching of English and other subjects such as P.E. We also have volunteers contribute at a nearby children's home where we provide organised informal education and other activities and have a number of other educational programmes that we are looking to build on this year.  We continue to support a local football team, Dynamo FC, and are looking to expand the impact that we can have on sport throughout the region. Finally, each year we work with a local school or other organisation to collaborate on a renovation project for one or more of their buildings in order to provide a more suitable learning environment for the children. As we expand we hope to be able to increase the frequency of these types of projects.

We both work full time aside from running Dave Squared, so my last few months have been spent temping to save enough money to fund my trip to Ghana.

Over the course of my trip I'll aim to keep you up to date with our projects, the effects that our volunteers are having in Ghana and also give you an insight into what is involved in running a charity like Dave Squared. I'll also look to try and give you a taste of Ghana itself and hopefully raise your interest in volunteering both overseas and at home.

Meanwhile, if you would like to contribute to the work that we do, please feel free to donate at http://www.charitygiving.co.uk/donate/davesquaredvolunteer/

I'll keep this blog updated regularly, so until next time, bye for now!

Dave

 

Posted by David ( 10:06 AM )
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Bon Bagay Yo (Good things)

The last time I wrote, I described the busy relief efforts our Network Team was engaged in to help contain the cholera outbreak.  I am glad to report that by the start of the New Year the number of cases all over the region (and across Haiti) dropped significantly.  This has given us some breathing space from getting daily reports from clinics and distributing supplies and allowed us to network further and broaden our work.
 
Coincidentally, it was around the same time that funding was finally secured for the rehabilitation unit at Haiti Hospital Appeal, so I have been able to support the staff to reopen the unit.  It officially opened in February as a general rehab unit, with specialist Spinal Injury care.

 
I have been providing a managerial and leadership role to help develop the service.  This includes providing theoretical and practical training to the therapists, new nurses and nursing students, helping the Haitian physio produce appropriate documentation, and attending weekly meetings with the multidisciplinary team to facilitate improvements to the service.
 
The service is now running with one physio and two therapy assistants, one psychologist, and a rehab physiatrist who visit from Port-au-Prince every fortnight.  The thirteen bedded-unit is full, mainly with Spinal Injury and Stroke patients. We are also receiving about 100 physio outpatients a month.  Work has just started on building the purpose built rehab centre, which will have a large physiotherapy gym, and a separate Occupational therapy treatment room.
 
Another big project I have been working on is helping other NGOs provide access to clean water.  The main reason that cholera hit Haiti so hard is the incredibly poor water access and sanitisation in both rural and urban areas.  With several NGOs recently coming to the region interested in working on improving access to clean water, the network has been able to support this work to improve it's effectiveness.  We have put together a 'water network' consisting of NGOs who purify water; fix broken hand pumps on wells; and others which have access to rigs to dig wells.  

We are partnering with them all to put a proposal together to provide access for over 400,000 people in the North of Haiti.  Our main role as the Network is to get a basic idea of where the priority areas are and establish what type of help the location needs.  We are feeding this back to the NGOs so that they can make informed decisions as to where to target, and not have to 'go blind' which is how it so often works.  The water network also gives the NGOs an opportunity to communicate between themselves so they can hopefully flag up areas of need more quickly.

 
 Working with water and sanitisation and hygiene (WASH) is not what I thought I would be, or want to be doing when I came out to Haiti.  However, after living here for even a couple of months, its clear to see what the priorities are of the communities I'm working in.  The network gives us the flexibility to direct our help where we feel it is most beneficial.  Working on such a broad range of projects is a really rewarding and engaging, and an educational experience too.  One massive thing I have learned from my time here so far is that to best help a low-income country, the work that is done must be 'driven from' the community, not 'driven into' the community, which is again the ethos of Haiti Hospital Appeal. We must always listen to the people we are helping.

Posted by Hannah ( 9:18 AM )
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