WATCHING the news and seeing the devastation wreaked by the April earthquake in Nepal, former Warrnambool woman Kirsten Jenkins knew she had to help.
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Having volunteered with the Red Cross as a community health delegate in the wake of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Ms Jenkins was all too familiar with the troubles the people of Nepal faced.
“When I saw the television coverage of Nepal, it brought back a lot of memories around Haiti,” she said.
“Nepal was a whole different situation to Haiti though. Haiti was much worse – there were 200,000 or 250,000 people killed in Haiti.
“But they have different challenges. The accessibility of villages in Nepal brought a whole new difficulty to responding to that disaster.
“The outlying areas are hard to access at the best of times, but they were cut off by landslides so it was harder to get supplies and relief into those areas. A lot of agencies working there got relief to outlying villages by helicopter.”
Ms Jenkins arrived in Chautara, located north-west of Kathmandu, in June, less than two months after the first of a series of tremors that killed an estimated 9000 people.
“There had been some significant clean-up with rubble clearance, but there were still thousands of people living under tarps and in tents,” she said.
“(Chautara was) one of the worst affected areas in the earthquake. It had one of the highest rates of rates of death and injury. The hospital in Chautara was severely damaged so they set up a field hospital. There was a lot of damage in Chautara but there was probably more damage in the outlying villages.”
The Red Cross reported that in “Chautara in Sindupalchowk district ... 90 per cent of the homes are destroyed” with “estimates that up to 40,000 homes in Sindupalchowk alone have been destroyed”.
“You’d go through (villages) and the whole place was basically destroyed,” Ms Jenkins said.
"They build their houses with bricks and rocks but no concrete, so the earthquake flattened the homes. The people that still homes were too scared to sleep inside them. They would use them during the day but slept outside.”
Stationed at a field hospital set up in lieu of Chautara’s destroyed hospital, Ms Jenkins taught villagers and local volunteers about disease prevention and hygiene promotion, and working with ‘health post’ staff.
“Most bigger villages have a health post where there is one nurse or one health worker, which is their first port of call before they have to walk two days to a hospital,” she said.
“We had one mum who came into the hospital with her six month old baby and she’d walked morning to night for two days in a row to get to hospital. That’s not unusual because of where they are. People don’t have cars (because of the terrain). Some of the roads get blocked off by landslides and its hard to get a vehicle like a motorbike in and out.
“Many of the people coming into the hospital were not as a result of the earthquake exactly, but as a result of clean-up (and after effects) – infected wounds and ongoing disease due to a lack of clean water and people living in close proximity so disease spreads quickly.
“(We also saw people with) pyschosocial issues, like post-traumatic stress. A lot of people came into the field hospital with headaches and stomach aches and their heart beating faster and levels of anxiety but they didn’t know what it was. Kids were having nightmares. Out in the villages, workers were seeing villagers fighting each other and getting really stressed.”
While the devastation stays with you, the community spirit and the positives were equally memorable, Ms Jenkins said.
“One of the volunteers I worked with was buried in the earthquake,” she explained.
“(After he was rescued) he really wanted to work and focus on helping the country recover. Most of the staff and most of the volunteers I worked with … were living outside their homes and in tents.
“It’s amazing. It really grounds you in terms of your outlook … and it’s something you take home with you.
“It was the same thing in Haiti, where people wanted to help – local people who had been affected and were living in camps would turn up to work every day because they felt like they wanted to make a difference.
“I’d not been (to Nepal) before and its an amazingly spectacular country and to see how hard these people work. They’re going into rice planting season and some of the rice fields have been destroyed, so whole communities are trying to get that back up and running.
“On one hand it’s really sad because whole villages have been wiped out but seeing them working together and trying to (put) everything back together … they’re the things I like to bring home.
“I’ve got a four-year-old and an 18-month-old, so seeing new babies born at the hospital … everyone was so happy there was new life coming through.”
Ms Jenkins said it was tough leaving her kids back home but thankfully she had “a very supportive partner who let me go”.
Some of Ms Jenkins’ family still lives in Warrnambool where she grew up.
After graduating from Warrnambool Secondary College, she moved to Melbourne to go to university, before relocating to the south-west to work at Corangamite Shire for a couple of years.
She’s now based in Melbourne working as an environmental health officer at Nillumbik Shire Council.
“As an environmental health officer, my background is (in) public health and preventing disease and safe water supplies,” she said.
“When you can use those skills in these kind of disaster situations, it gives (your work) more meaning.”