Sunday June 17th

Namaste,

Time flies when you are living with six energetic medical students in a busy city with so many sites, sounds and smells you can feel the synapses in your brain firing frantically.

 I can’t believe it’s been one whole week since we arrived in Nepal. The six of us girls have settled in at our guest house and are enjoying interacting with the students at PAHS. There are 4 of us that just finished our first year of medical school at UBC: Stephanie, Heather, Lindsay and Skye, and two who are heading into third year in the Fall: Supreet and Kate.  Besides getting used to the heat and sounds of the busy city, we are also getting accustomed to the friendly and welcoming nature of everyone we have met so far here at PAHS.

We spent our first week here in Patan getting to know the students and faculty at PAHS, sitting in on some interesting lectures, scheduling our activities for the weeks to come and taking in the sites of Kathmandu. Feels like we fumbled our way through the first week and have started to scratch the surface on life in Nepal and what school is like for medical students here at PAHS.

Today Lindsay and I did our first workshop: Finding Reliable Resources Online. This is something that we have found challenging at times especially when looking for PBL learning issues.  Based on some preliminary surveying of the students, it seemed they too were hoping to learn more about this topic. After overcoming a few challenges in the scheduling department, the workshop ended up a success (based on feedback) as well as a good learning experience for our next workshops to come. Beyond the content, the students also told us they enjoyed the example we used with a famous Bollywood actor as well as the pictures of UBC, killer whales and sea otters to show them a little bit of “Vancouver.”

We have planned a number of workshops and activities for the weeks to come and I look forward to learning more about Nepal and getting to know the PAHS students! We will update again very soon.

Namaste.