Giving aid abroad

After lugging a hockey bag and five boxes of medical supplies, along with $6,000 of donations to the Dominican Republic, Jessica Lyall came home with a different perspective on Canada’s medical system.
Here, you go to the hospital whenever you need it, she said.
There, it’s a different story.
The former Bracebridge and Muskoka Lakes Secondary School student, now a student at Georgian College, went to the Dominican with fellow nursing, paramedic, massage, dental and opticianry students to provide care to impoverished areas.
They left for the nine-day excursion on April 24 to provide basic care to people who have no access to running water, nutritious food, education or sanitation.
The students were divided into three groups, each going to different areas to provide care.
Lyall described areas in the mountains where people temporarily moved out of their homes so the students could use them as a clinic. Sometimes they saw patients at a kitchen table while others waited in the yard with the chickens.
One day they helped about 400 people from a makeshift clinic at a school.
“They were fighting to get seen because they were waiting all day and we were closing the gates,” said Lyall.
“It’s crazy how desperate they are,” she said.
Even at the hospital, which had five rooms with eight beds in each room, the gates closed promptly at 4 p.m. every day, not to reopen until the morning.
The things they encountered most often were fungal rashes, skin infections, the flu and colds. She said sometimes people faked being sick to get medication like Tylenol and Advil for future use because it’s so scarce.
Lyall’s group stayed at a monastery in San Jose de Ocoa where there was electricity, but only a few hours of running water each day.
The first day Lyall decided not to take a shower because the water was so cold, thinking there would certainly be warm water by morning. Instead, there was no water, only a bucket sitting in the shower that was used to flush the toilet.
“I lived like them for nine days, but now I’m going to go back to my beautiful home … so that made me feel kind of guilty,” she said.
Part of the school’s challenge was for each person to fill a hockey bag with supplies such as vitamins, pain relievers, antibiotic ointments, alcohol swabs and medications to take to the hospital and to help the people while they were there.
Lyall filled the hockey bag along with five or six boxes, and also raised about $5,000.
It was all from the article in the newspaper, she said. Some of the donors she knew, some she didn’t.
“I just want them to know it was greatly appreciated,” she said.
Lyall is currently interning at the Royal Victoria Hospital where she hopes to get a job when she finishes school.
She’d love to go back to the Dominican, she said, though initially she didn’t think she would.

Small - Large
|
Print
|
Email
|
|