- We have arrived at our respective homes in Haiti and Norway after a busy week in New Delhi, India, and have just started to process the overwhelming amount of inspiring moments. We would like to share some of these with you through a little collage of pictures and following text.
From the left: Clemanceau Luckner, Gina Stensrud and Kristine Andreassen
Due to all of us living in different parts of the world: dr. Gina in Oslo , Norway, dr. Clemanceau in Saint Louis du Sud, Haiti and dr. Kristine in Tromsø, Norway, we did not have the chance to finalize our oral and poster presentations until we arrived in Delhi. We spent three intense working days on this, before the conference started.
Clemanceau is a young doctor from Haiti, who works in the resource poor public health care of Saint Louis du Sud. Gina is a Norwegian young doctor based in Oslo, who has worked with Prosjekt Haiti and their work on health care development in Saint Louis du Sud since January 2017. Kristine is one of the initiative taker for this health care development project, a board member of Prosjekt Haiti, doctor and a PhD student at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, affiliated with the Norwegian Centre for Rural medicine (NSDM).
Although, we did manage to squeeze in some rounds of sightseeing, spending most of them wandering around New Delhi’s colorful markets, drinking tea with their sellers.
The world becomes smaller and smaller! On one of our first days we met with Kai Simon Eikli Yuen, a good friend of Prosjekt Haiti from his previous work period in Haiti. He now works at the Norwegian Embassy in New Delhi, where also Maya Singh, Kristine’s childhood friend and neighbor works. Maya and her family has known and contributed to Prosjekt Haiti’s work for years. A nice reunion and an insightful morning coffee chat uniting our Haitian, Norwegian and Indian perspectives, @norwegianembassy new delhi
The Wonca Rural Word Conference
Our days at the conference were busy and filled with inspiring people to learn from, both through presentations, discussions, and more informal chats. Our heads are filled with new knowledge and ideas.
A highlight, of course, was our oral presentation on the challenges we face with bridging the gap between traditional health believes and practitioners (shamans and plant doctors within the Vodou religion) and biomedical health care (doctors, nurses, etc). The questions afterwards were many, and the discussion very engaging. More about our project here
Rural Café
Another bright highlight was the Rural Café, organized by the network of young rural doctors across the world called Rural Seeds. Here we participated as a part of the panel. A lovely hour among both the leaders of Wonca Rural and the leaders among the young rural doctors movement.
We met and bonded with the initiative taker and leader of Rural Seeds, Mayara Floss, which we hope to collaborate with in the future. The amount of work she and her Brazilian/international team has put down to make the Rural Seeds network as strong as it is (only within a year!) is really inspiring.
Maraya Floss, Rural Cafe initative taker, to the left
Our plans for the future where finalized until the very last minutes we had together, at New Delhi Airport. We put our heads together (tèt ansanm in Haitian Kreyol) to sketch out how to make our participation at the conference valuable in our work to develop a better health care for Saint Louis du Sud – a commune of 80 000 people with very scarce health care resources and overwhelming health problems, including lack of infrastructure and health personnel.
Some of our plans are: to organize Rural Cafés for young health care providers and students both in Haiti and Tromsø; to share our experiences and ideas at Rural Seed’s blog, Rural Success Stories; arrange regular seminars for health education to the local people in Saint Louis du Sud (rural Haiti); and scale up our work to train community health workers, including recruiting more engaged lay people for such roles. Clemanceau will start the work on ground in Saint Louis du Sud as soon as he comes home, while Gina and myself will start the work on preparing another visit from the working group of young Norwegian doctors, who will support Clemancea, his colleague’s in the local public health care and Prosjekt Haiti’s work on health care development locally.
Gina behind the camera.
