Welcome!

Hello family and friends,

We're very excited to be writing our first blog entry!! Our goal with this post is to welcome you, our lovely readers, and to give you some information about where we will be working and playing during our placement. Here is a rough outline of what we will be up to:

Lauren, Matthew, and I arrive in Kathmandu May 1st, 2010. Lauren and I will be spending our first week working in Kathmandu at the Aadharbhut Prasuti Sewa Kendra Basic Maternity Service Centre.

APS Kendra is a freestanding birth centre founded and run by nurse midwives who are dedicated to providing quality, inexpensive, empowering and sustainable woman-friendly maternity care. Here we will be providing prenatal care as well as attending any births that happen during the week. We will be working with nurse-midwife and APS Kendra founder Laxmi Tamang, who thankfully speaks English (she has her Masters in Public Health from the University of New South Wales in Australia) and will be able to help us with our first week of learning Nepali! You can check out more about the birth centre at: http://www.apskendra.org.np/.

Our second clinical placement will be in Bharatpur, a large city southwest of Kathmandu, in the Chitwan Region. Here we will be spending four weeks at the Bharatpur Hospital, a teaching hospital and the second busiest maternity hospital in Nepal (about 30 births a day). We will be on a call schedule with other medical and nurse-midwife students and rotate attending births. We're not sure of any details yet, but are sure it will all work out once we arrive!

Our last placement will be back in Kathmandu at the Kathmandu Model Hospital under the guidance of one of the executive members of the Nepal Midwifery Society. At this time we are expecting this placement to be purely observational, although Lauren and I are hoping this will change once we arrive and meet with our supervisor. We will keep you posted. To learn more about KMH visit: http://www.kmh-nepal.de/.

So that is a brief outline of our 6 weeks - thank you for reading. Lauren and I will be writing more posts in the near future, so come back soon!

Namaste,

Yarrow