A day in the (camp) life.

Mornings start early here. My alarm goes off at 6:00am, but I hit the snooze button a couple times before dragging my butt out of bed around 6:15am. I enjoy quiet mornings alone, so I always try to wake up early and get to the kitchen before everyone else. As I wait for my coffee to steep, I prepare a pretty standard breakfast of toast, eggs, and fresh mango, then take my breakfast back down to my room where I can eat peacefully and get ready before the day smacks me in the face.

The days are long... after our morning team briefing in the office to go over any last minute plans for the day, I meet our medical teams downstairs and sort out the vehicles we'll be taking for the day. The journey to the camp is long... depending on traffic it can take anywhere between 2.5-3 hours from the office to where we park. The traffic is usually brutal - zig-zagging between people, tom-toms, vehicles, pot-holes, and mini road lakes - and often we are at a stand-still in traffic jams. Once we arrive in the camp it's still another 35-60 minutes of walking, (lugging our backpacks stuffed with medical supplies, waterbottles, and umbrellas) before we reach our clinic site.

As the mega-camp only has one rough (partially constructed) road that runs through the center of it (which sometimes isn't even open), the only way to navigate through the smaller camps is along the wynding paths and hills that have been created amongst and inbetween the rivers, houses, and hills that comprise the camp. Most paths are packed dirt, but some are made of sandbags, bamboo bridges, bricks, and cement... and every once and awhile you find yourself walking up and down steep single-track hillside trails alongside workers carrying sacks of sandbags on their heads. Walking through the camp is an experience all in itself. There are people everywhere - men carrying heavy loads of wood over their shoulders, sacks of sand on their head, or long pieces of bamboo, there are kids pumping water out of the many wells (screaming and happily jumping naked in the pool of water they're creating), women walking in packs covered head to toe in black fabric, and there is a constant surround-sound song of children screaming one of the three English phrases they know: "How are you?!?!" "Fine, thank you!!" and "Bye-Bye!!". And even if you do answer them, they just continue yelling it at you, sometimes running up beside you to grab your hand or touch your arm before giggling and running the other way. There are no trees in the camp, and it's wide open to either the relentless heat from the sun, or the torrential downpours of rain. There is no shelter from anything, so you just continue on...one foot in front of the other, hoping you don't mis-step and accidently lose one of your rubber boots in the mud.

Once reaching our clinic, which is currently a tent, our team goes about setting up for the day, and I'll see to the necessary tasks on my to-do list: coordinating meetings with other aid workers or NGOs in the camp, attending meetings, checking on the building progress of our new clinic, supervising my team, etc.

Things are becoming more fixed in the camp, and the emergency humanitarian phase is slowly transitioning to more longer-term thinking. As we are primarily working in a new camp that is only just beginning to receive relocated households, we have been working on, and eagerly awaiting, the completion of our organization's new fixed health facility. Though it's been through the many hours of effort from my co-workers to make this health facility become a reality, this week I was the one lucky enough to be in the camp for the official handover of our new clinic. Right now it's just the bare-bones building, but we pray that soon this amazing bamboo, rope, and tarpaulin structure is going to be the future home of the first fixed health clinic in this new camp! It was such an honour to be there that day and experience the official handover, and I can't wait to be a part of this journey over the next year.

Then when the day is over we do it all again... in reverse: pack-up, walk the 35-60 minutes back to the vehicles, and then drive another 2.5-3 hours back home. When I finally arrive back at the office, exhausted, hungry, dehyrated, stinking, and soaked in sweat, I've still got a couple hours of work left to do before calling it a day. The days are definitely full-on, but I love every minute of it. Even though I'm not the one providing direct patient care, which as a nurse is definitely tough, it's amazing to see our talented team of medical professionals working hard in brutal conditions to not only provide life-saving care, but hope, to the Rohingyas.

To think about the unspeakable things these people have been through (I heard from a co-worker the other day that approximately 10,000 births are expected within the next month...all likely the result of brutal rapes as they attempted to flee Myanmar)... I feel so blessed to be a part of the larger humanitarian community banding together to provide urgent and necessary care to so many people in need.

But I think these past 3 weeks have caught up to me... that and having so many of our international and national staff sick... so today I've spent my only day off this week curled up watching movies and drinking tea, nursing a sore throat and some congestion. Being sick sucks, but thankfully it's nothing serious. Plus it gives me a chance to check out some of the movies loaded up on my external hard drive - always trying to find the good in every situation :)