NWMN Edition
ISSUE 171 SUMMER 2015–2016 THE NORTH & WEST MELBOURNE NEWS IS PRODUCED BY VOLUNTEERS AT THE CENTRE Trek Medic from North Melbourne to Nepal Dr Hong Wu (right) and Dr Allan Au, president of Trek Medic Photo: Jim Weatherill Katrina Kincade-Sharkey Everest and medical camp in the Annapurna ists in Nepal. There’s no rehab there.” She looks areas, into 100 messages, phone calls and region, then a planned slower-paced scouting away, averting her glorious, lava-brown eyes. emails each day while coordinating reinforce- trip to Terai on 25 April changed everything. Somehow, road trauma or violent assault ment Trek Medic teams from Australia. EN thousand brutal deaths and at least Dubbed Gorkha from its epicentre’s region, around Melbourne seem less catastrophic with “Then there was critical collaboration with as many long-term injuries are the ago- the 25 April quake’s injury toll is now more leading local treatment and rehab facilities, yet Nepalese organisations and medical teams, nising physical measure of devastation than 23,000, its massive magnitude of 7.9MW those advantages are foreign concepts during where it turned into meeting some of the most T amazing and resilient people I will ever know, from Nepal’s earthquakes last April and May. deeming it meteorologically violent. Total third-world disasters. Another measure — that third-world na- construction and landscape damage was US$5 A keen traveller, Hong dedicated 12 months into making friends for life, into receiving help tion’s paltry aid allowance — was one sack of billion, which is about 25 per cent of Nepal’s to medical volunteering, research and travel, and hospitality from strangers, into sleeping rice and one blanket per family, yet no tents GDP.
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