Asha helps reduce tsunami impact

Medicine

University of Adelaide medical student Asha Patel was featured in the Adelaidean's November 2005 edition ahead of her trip to help families affected by the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, assisted with some funding from the University of Adelaide. She has now returned to Australia and has written of her experiences in Sri Lanka.

My trip started with a week in Perth - I spent this time grading glasses (using a 20-year-old machine to manually read off the power of each and every lens on each and every pair of glasses... urgggh), and getting to know four of the other people going on the trip.

Galle is the town we stayed in when we got to Sri Lanka, and it was badly hit by the tsunami. On the way down the coast, we stopped to see the site of one of the world's worst train disasters.

When the tsunami hit, the train driver slowed down because of the water in the tracks, and 500 people from the beach ran to the train to jump up on the roof of the train, that already had about 1000 passengers, to get away from the rising water. Then the second wave hit and pushed the train straight over and off the tracks, and killed everyone on and in the train.

As we went down, we saw the remains of hundreds of buildings that were made uninhabitable by the tsunami. The beaches are so sandy and long and just beautiful. There were lots of fishing boats, people selling fish, and people living in shacks beside the remains of their old concrete houses.

There were Catholic and Buddhist temples, and some mosques and Hindu temples too. It was very much like India - people everywhere buzzing around and very busy, but somehow more laid back. And the kids are so friendly!

We spent the first week in the hospital, and saw lots of rheumatic fever and congenital problems on the paediatric ward and also lots of serious infections and hepatic diseases. It was mostly the same stuff you see at home, but in different proportions and often in far more advanced stages of disease. Heart disease is a big problem, obesity not so.

I worked several hours a week at a Tsunami Trust community centre that takes kids before and after school, teaching English, playing games and reading books.

I spent a whole day there teaching them about health - I talked about the idea of a food pyramid, and we did things like brushing teeth, and colouring in. I cleaned and dressed all their wounds and made up songs about eating food after washing hands. That day was my idea and I was in charge of organising it. It was my little baby and I was so, so proud of it!

The kids made posters with the lyrics to our songs, posters about eating healthily and games about dressing our wounds and using Dettol.

We bought a world map and heaps of stationery for them, using money we had left over from sponsorship, then went and bought desks and chairs and exercise books out of our own pockets.

I made a photomontage of all the kids from the pics we'd taken of them over the past three weeks - they loved it so much!! They were all pointing out, "Oooh that's me," and loved, loved, loved to see themselves in printed photos!

I got to travel around a bit in the weekends - on one occasion, we went north to the hill country, climbed 7.5km up hill in a tea plantation and got lost because the clouds were so low that we couldn't see the road. I also visited monasteries, a lake and temples, cinnamon plantations, spice gardens and a tea factory.

We went into the rural villages and held eye camps - mostly checking vision, looking for cataracts, glaucoma and manually checking vitreous pressure with hand-held tonometers that they used in Australia in the 1940s! A local ophthalmologist came with us, and he helped us diagnose the hard stuff. Lots of glasses prescribing eventually drove us up the wall...I am so sick of glasses!

I'm absolutely sure that Sri Lanka is the best country I've visited in the world. I love the people so, so much. There's so much left to do there - if anyone wants to come with me, I hope to get back there this time next year!