Eleanor Davis

I’ve done quite a bit of travelling over the last few years and when I come back from each trip, I can usually slip back into ‘normal’ life quite easily. But I haven’t stopped missing the experience since coming back from my placement in Kathmandu. I’ve been missing the people, the hustle and bustle… I think it was that beyond just travelling through another country, I actually lived in Kathmandu. I was immersed in the local culture and spent most of my days there interacting with local people in a hospital setting.

When I first walked into my placement hospital, I wasn’t as overwhelmed as I thought I might be. Don’t get me wrong, it was still a completely different experience from what I was used to in my NHS placement hospitals. But I’d told myself that it was going to be a huge shock, which I think helped me adjust when I actually arrived.

I saw fascinating stuff while I was on placement. Patients or their family members could just walk up to the pharmacy and order whatever medication they’d been told they needed — no prescription required!

At the start of each shift on the paediatric ward, nurses would write parents a shopping list of things they’d need to buy for their child that day. It would be syringes, needles, medication — that sort of thing. Then the parents would go to the pharmacy and get whatever they could. It was often the case that the parents couldn’t afford everything on the list, so the nurses would just have to make do with what the parents gave them. Procedures weren’t always by the book, but staff couldn’t afford to work that way if they wanted to help patients in their care.

When it comes to seeing different kinds of cases, there’s one that stands out in particular. A little boy came in one day and the staff diagnosed him with celiac disease, which is something I have. I was about the same age as him when I got my diagnosis and it’s something that’s so easily diagnosed in the UK — a blood test and a biopsy and then you crack on with a gluten-free diet.

In the case of the little boy, the problem was that his parents couldn’t afford to take him to the hospital until the symptoms had become severe. It turned out that because they had left it so long, the disease had seriously damaged his intestines and ended up in ICU to get some of it removed. They weren’t sure if he was going to be able to take food orally ever again. This is so unlikely to happen in the UK. Affordability doesn’t enter our heads because for us healthcare is free at the point of use.

Something else that struck me was the number of kids coming in with nephrotic syndrome. We don’t really see kidney problems in children in the UK unless it’s a rare condition. I asked around to try to understand why the hospital in Kathmandu had so many kidney-related cases, but no one could give me a concrete answer.

Something I quickly realised was that most of the local staff had exactly the same knowledge as we do in the NHS. The problem was that they weren’t always able to put that knowledge into practice in the way they wanted. They had such limited resources and they were so obviously underfunded compared to our healthcare system. I thought I’d go in and build up a rapport with the staff and just get on with it like I did every other placement. But I ended up having a tremendous amount of empathy for the position they were in and their frustration. I think that strengthened my relationships with them.

One week, some of the hospital staff came to the Work the World house to join in the weekly barbecue. It was during times like this that we felt more like a part of the local community than just people from another country who clocked in and out of the hospital each day.

I saw so much over the course of my four weeks, and it made a big impact on me. I didn’t spend all of my time in the hospital, though. I had three free weekends to explore the country, and my Work the World housemates and I were intent on making the most of them.

We stayed in Kathmandu for our first weekend. We wanted to get properly acquainted with it and really settle into local life. We went to visit temples, ate delicious food and went on some cable cars so we could see the city from above.

We went on a yoga retreat for our second weekend. It was up in the mountains about 45 minutes outside of Kathmandu and it was absolutely gorgeous. All our food was included and it was a vegan and vegetarian menu. We stayed overnight and had three yoga sessions over the course of the weekend. There was a sauna and a steam room and you could go and get massages as well. We went on a mountain hike as well, through this beautiful scenery up to see a temple and a cave. I won’t forget the experience.

The following weekend we travelled out to Chitwan National Park. I wasn’t all that excited about going on this trip — I had done safaris before and they were all sort of the same thing. But as it was our last weekend, I didn’t want to spend it away from all the people I’d made friends with, so I went along. I am so glad I did because it was amazing. It really felt like we were seeing animals in the wild. We were walking through this dense rainforest and animals would suddenly appear from nowhere. We saw tigers, rhinos, crocodiles, kingfishers, storks, turtles… It was just incredible.

Honestly, if want to go on a placement, don’t waste any more time thinking about it and just get on with it. I wish I could tell my past self not to stress about the trip, because Work the World give you as much support as you need right the way through the experience. It’s completely worth it.

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