News

In June we interviewed SKIP Southampton volunteer Emily Mayo, discussing her plans, expectations and fears for her summer. A few months later, with the dust settled from her trip to Madagascar, we catch up with her…

Hi Emily! What are you up to?

Hi! I just got back in from SKIP Southampton’s first committee meeting of the year. Lots of jobs to be done!

Can you quickly summarise your trip?

It was really rewarding, very challenging and I have no regrets deciding to get involved.

Okay, why was that?

A lot of what we did was expected as we were shown and taught a lot during the two training weekends before going out. All of that was good, but it was the unexpected that really stood out for me.

We’ll get to that in a moment, but for those not in the know, what were the expected things?

I lived along with my group and Malagasy counterparts (young people from a nearby local town who we collaborate with in all our groups) in a small village in the region of Ambohimahamasina for two and a half weeks. On a typical day we got up at 7, walked the 2 miles to the building site in the mornings, where we assisted in putting the first half of a community centre together (hopefully finished by group 2 in august). We would come back in the afternoon, have some lunch then start our afternoon teaching. This was to large groups of children from villages all over the surrounding area. We focused on hand hygiene, oral hygiene and nutrition messages mixed in with a lot of games, some educational, some not!

After this we had our afternoon tea and hosted a different group of the community for discussion every night. This was really enlightening and it was great to get a feel for each other’s cultures and lifestyles. After this we would have some dinner, write in our diaries and play a few games, then collapse into bed, ready to start it all again the next day!

What kind of thing didn’t you expect?

I can’t believe how close I got to the Malagasy counterparts we worked with. It felt like I was leaving old friends behind when we left, it was really sad! I’ll miss them a lot.
Also, an unexpected moment came when a group of young people from quite a long distance away came to the village where we were staying to discuss family planning issues. We ended up having a long chat and hopefully passed on some useful information to them. It’s those kind of moments when you really feel you are making a difference to people’s lives.

What were the challenges you faced while out there?

Apart from the obvious language barriers that the Counterparts helped a lot with, as a team leader it was quite difficult when the village and town teams came together again towards the end of the trip. Both teams had gotten so close it was hard to reintegrate everyone to being one whole team again, but with some cunning seat placement and encouraging everyone to be inclusive we managed to get over that hurdle!

And finally what advice would you have for someone contemplating a trip?

DO IT! I learnt a lot about another culture, got to meet amazing people, made great friends and have a renewed appreciation of what you really need in life to be happy. I couldn’t recommend the experience enough.

Thanks to Emily for taking the time to talk to us, and we wish her the best of luck in her role as project coordinator in the coming year.

For more information about SKIP Southampton’s ongoing work in Madagascar, please visit their project page by clicking 'our projects' at the top of the page.

Students for Kids International Projects (SKIP) is a healthcare student-led charity founded and registered in 2003 which has branches in 12 UK universities. SKIP branches work across the world developing sustainable community-based projects in conjunction with identified local partner organisations.

Our vision is two-fold. Firstly, we aim to improve the health, education and welfare of vulnerable children through interventions including health promotion, water and sanitation, nutrition, education and facilitation of the enablement of children with disabilities. Secondly, we aim to empower students by delivering training to advance their skills, developing them into globally and culturally aware healthcare professionals.
SKIP is a Registered Charity in England and Wales; No. 1099804 and Scotland; No. SC040556

SKIP Barts have spent the past year preparing for project following a research trip last year in 2009. Unfortunately their previous project in Gujurat was unable to continue and was subsequently withdrawn. However this left them in the exciting position of developing a new project. The following article illustrates the process of a new branch as they begin to establish a new project:

Our story begins in the summer of 2009 when seven volunteers, including two Project Coordinators, visited projects all over India. We decided which charities to visit by thorough research, from the UK, followed by direct communication, mainly via email.

We visited three organisations:

Literacy India, an incredible charity, run by Indraani Singh and based in the slums of Delhi. They run a multitude of outreach schools for the children ‘rag-pickers’ of migrant labourers, a blind girls tailoring school, medical camps, a central primary school for hundreds of the poorest children and employment for women making beautiful recycled paper bags, frames and other products. Despite successful trial lessons, we were unsure how much we could contribute to such a powerful dispersed set-up, but have since raised over £2000 for Literacy India through our RAG fundraising and sale of their products.

Human Service Trust (HST), an inspiring organisation running medical and eye camps out into the poorest surrounding areas, providing homework and IT classes for school-age children and English lessons and financial support of college education for the wonderful 16-22 year old girls of Haryana. During our time with HST we did some interactive role plays with the girls, which stood in stark contrast to their traditional teaching.

Vatsalya in Jaipur, an organisation with similar aims to Literacy India, but different methods – actively removing lone children from the slums and placing them in a residential home, miles outside of the city. There were hot debates within the SKIP team and with the head of the charity after visiting Vatsalya, but again we concluded that more could be done in a less well-established project.

Bal Ashram Trust, a transitory rehabilitation centre for child labourers rescued in police raids of the worst factories all over India. The boys are taken to Bal Ashram where they are given counseling, basic education, practical skills and are returned home after a year and monitored, to ensure they continue in education. The framework seemed perfect for the transitory nature of our own summer project and there seemed to be many ways in which we could bolster the curriculum already in place, with health promotion workshops. Their outreach into the surrounding rural villages seemed revolutionary. Bal Ashram has set up ‘Child Parliaments’ which feed back concerns to the local authorities, ‘Barefoot colleges’ – lessons and book supplies to the poorest children who cannot attend school, health camps and ‘Womens’ Forums’ to educate women about their rights and government entitlements. Kailash Satyarthi, of Global March (against child labour) and ActionAid travelled down from Delhi to meet us and discuss possibilities of our involvement.

It was a tough choice between Literacy India and Bal Ashram, but after much discussion, advice and many SWOT (Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats) analyses, we decided to partner with Bal Ashram and began negotiations for our Memorandum of Understanding with them.

In an astonishingly successful recruitment push, we interviewed all 45 applicants and whittled them down to a group of 16, whom we planned to split into two waves of three weeks, with a four-day handover. After a variety of problems, we are left with a core eight volunteers, in a single group, for our first year at Bal Ashram. We will be there for three weeks, from July 28- August 16. There is much excitement in the group, and everyone has worked very hard preparing lesson plans for health promotion topics such as drugs, sanitation, healthy eating, puberty and sexual health, dental hygiene, infectious diseases and vitamin deficiencies. We also plan to visit their numerous outreach programmes and we hope we might be able to get the children working towards a health promotion performance to the villagers of the poverty-stricken surrounding area.

With SKIP Glasgow, Edinburgh and Cardiff already out on project and many other branches preparing to depart over the next few days, excitement is building amongst SKIP volunteers and committees regarding the prospects for the coming summer.
We got in touch with Emily Mayo, a volunteer for Southampton, preparing to go out with Group 1 to Madagascar. We also to spoke to Tim Smith, one of the project coordinators who has been organising the project and the volunteers along with Sarah Jackson and the rest of the SKIP Southampton committee. To find out how they responded, read on...

Tell us about yourself.
I am Emily Mayo a 1st Year Medic at Southampton Uni and I’m from Essex originally.

How did you get involved with SKIP?
Someone came to one of my lectures and did a shout out, talking about the project in Madagascar and it sounded really fun and worthwhile, as well as something to fill the long summer with, so I decided to get involved! I went along to an information evening, applied, and now I’m getting ready to go on the trip.

What are you going out to do in Madagascar?
Well, I’m going to be working as part of the village project, where we are helping to build a health centre, teaching children in weekday workshops about dental hygiene and how to prevent malaria, and reinforcing hygiene and nutrition taught in previous years. As a new thing this year we’re running Saturday workshops about proper breastfeeding that we’ve all been learning about through our training weekends.

How will this help the local community?
The knowledge we pass on will help to reduce rates of diarrhoea and increase general health of the population to help everyone there live longer and healthier lives. We learnt that a part of the SKIP ethos is to teach people to teach and to eventually not be needed so we will leave skills and knowledge to children and mothers at the workshops to pass around to others in their community.

What’s your role as group leader?
I have to be the first point of call for volunteers who have problems and am a link between events on project, the partner organisations and the Southampton committee back home.

Is there anything you’re worried about?
A couple of things! As I am one of the group leaders, I will have to keep harmony in the group and get everyone working together, but I hope this won’t be a problem as everyone in the group is really nice.

What are you most excited about?
I can’t wait to meet the local people, learn about their culture, stay with my host family and of course the teaching, I love being around children, so that will be a big highlight!

What are your expectations of your time there?
I think I’ll grow as a person, especially through learning about another culture and working in a team, all working towards the same cause. Most of all, having a great time and having a real positive impact on the community!

Thanks Emily, and best of luck to you!

Now to Tim Smith, the joint project coordinator who has been working tirelessly all year to put the project together, and will be pulling the strings in the background all summer.

When and how did you get involved with SKIP Southampton originally?
I first saw it at the medic’s bunfight and I was looking to do charity work at the end of my first year, and SKIP seemed to fit the bill, and I’ve been on the project twice since then, and been training coordinator.

What have the committee been up to this year getting volunteers ready and the project ready?
We recruited volunteers early on with aim of giving people plenty of notice of training weekends and fundraisers so that we could get everyone involved. We have taught our volunteers all about SKIP and how we work, Madagascar and the charities that we work with, what’s been achieved so far and what we have planned for this summer and beyond!

The more practical things we’ve taught are teaching methods, cultural sensitivity issues specific to Madagascar, health and safety and child protection to ensure everything we do this summer is both safe and effective. Of course we’ve also played a lot of fun games to get all the groups to know each other better and most importantly not being embarrassed looking silly in front of each other, which is very important if you’re going to keep children interested during the teaching sessions!

After a thorough handover, we’ve been in regular contact with the charities we work with to prepare everything on the ground. We have been checking the general situation around Antananarivo (Madagascar’s capital) and the political situation for the entire country.

We’ve put a lot of work in adding interventions to our project schedule, with Sarah Yamamoto doing a lot research into oral health, malaria prevention, oral rehydration therapy and breast feeding, topics that have been added based on feedback and requests from the Malagasy people we have taught and collaborated with in the past.

What are you hoping for the project to achieve over the summer?
First and foremost establish our presence back out there after a one year absence due to the political problems in Madagascar. Delivering the new oral health messages whilst reinforcing the older, but still important hygiene and nutrition messages. We will be collecting more feedback this year to see how well our teaching is working, along with carrying out some observational research providing baseline data on hand washing in the community in the Old Town.

I really hope our new community workshops are a success and the community feels they got what they wanted from the volunteers’ presence. For the volunteers I hope they will learn about the developing world and feel empowered to get involved further in the SKIP project and later in life.

What words do you have for any SKIP volunteers getting ready to go on project, or anyone going out to the developing world for that matter?
Learn as much as you can about the place that you are going to and what you will be doing before you go, as you won’t have to ask too many stupid questions and you can hit the ground running in achieving your aims.

Basically this should stop you standing in front of a class of children on the first day trying to work out how you are actually supposed to wash your hands, let alone being able to teach them!

Certainly a summer full of potential, for volunteers, partner organisations and most importantly, the communities that all of this hard work is trying to benefit.

If you would like to get involved with SKIP, as a volunteer at your university or through our external volunteer scheme, or even as a professional advisor please have a look around our website for the relevant contact details or email info@skipkids.org.uk To donate towards our continuing work around the world, please press the red donate button in the top right corner of the page.

Dr Steve Allen, Senior Lecturer in Paediatrics at Swansea University and Course Coordinator of their International Health module, has kindly agreed to come and speak during our National Conference on the 20th-21st of February.

He will delivery the Plenary Speech to around 100 students on the Saturday afternoon on the topic of "Where do infants and children die?". He will explore the main direct caues of death and disability and what are the main risk factors? This will lead into a discussion on the obstacles and opportunities to improving children's health, a topic close to the hearts of many of those involved with SKIP, and is sure to interest all of those attending the National Conference.

The National Conference is an opportunity for the 12 branches around the UK to come together and share ideas and inspiration for each other's work in the developing world. SKIP Members will also receive training from the National Committee and Executive Board, aimed at making interventions carried out over the summer months as effective as they can be.

SKIP would like to take this opportunity to thank Dr Allen for giving us his time. The Spring 2010 National Conference is shaping up to be a thoroughly interesting and exciting weekend.