Suze speaks!

An great evening at the Oxford Global Health Group, hearing the experiences of two very different VSO health volunteers.

Allan has been a health management advisor in several countries, and shared stories of his time in the Gambia - including the drunken doctor who became Minister of Health, the piles of donated machines which were the wrong voltage, and the best way to ensure patients take three pills a day when they have no watch and only one meal (give it to the traditional healer).

Suze is a health visitor who worked on the VSO child and maternal health programme in NE Cambodia - we spend quite a lot of time together, but I didn't actually know what she did out there - and was impressed at the way she managed to encourage education, in patients and midwives, and ensure partograms were completed rather than made up!

They were both very honest about the challenges of different cultures, the frustrations of limited resources and endemic corruption, and the difficulty in making lasting, sustainable improvements - but still left me inspired to get out there and do it again sometime soon!