ATTENTION ALL STUDENTS GOING ABROAD AND/OR DOING DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS
Are you adequately prepared for your volunteer experience? What are the ethics of taking photos or video of people in your host community? Are you culturally competent? What does cultural competence mean? How do you plan for a safe health and travel experience? What if there is an emergency? Join us for presentations and discussion at the Pre-departure Training Workshop Day.
Please register here: Pre-Departure Training Day Registration Form. Deadline to register is March 18th, 2011.
If you have any questions, please contact Angela at angie.babuk@gmail.com
The UBC Global Health Initiative has prepared a Pre-Departure Training Day for all students going abroad. Be it an overseas elective, a GHI project, or another overseas project, volunteering, etc. you are encouraged to attend!
| Subject: | Pre-departure Training |
| Date: | Sunday, March 27, 2011 (Registration deadline is March 18th) |
| Time: | 8:30am-3:00pm (8:30 breakfast, 9:00am start) |
| Locations: | Vancouver – MSAC (corner of Heather St and 12th Ave) |
| Victoria – MSB 131 | |
| Prince George – NHSC 9-374 | |
| Agenda: | Registration/Breakfast provided at 8:30am-9:00am |
| Keynote Speaker | |
| Travel and Health Safety Planning | |
| Global Health Ethics: Unintended consequences of global health work | |
| Lunch (provided) | |
| Intercultural Competence | |
| Knowledge Translation, Sustainability and Community Engagement |
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BELOW ARE THE SESSION DESCRIPTIONS AND SPEAKER BIOS FOR YOUR INFORMATION.
Session Descriptions
Travel and Health Safety Planning
You must take care of yourself first! In this session you will be advised on how to prepare for a safe and healthy travel experience during your electives/work in a developing country. We will go through a pre-departure checklist to become familiar with resources to plan safe and healthy travel eg. immunizations, medications, travel documents, emergency procedures, post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP).
Global Health Ethics: Unintended consequences of global health work
This session will familiarize students with the importance of understanding how our actions while abroad (both as a volunteer and as a tourist) may result in unintended consequences. We hear from student experiences abroad, difficult situations that you may find yourself in while abroad, and also go through a case study that will encourage you to fully appreciate the implications of your decisions. Dr. Grant Charles will help facilitate this session.
International Development Work and Cultural Difference
So you’re off on an experience of a lifetime. You’ve got your vaccinations, booked your flight, have your accommodations set up, talked to a friend who has lived in the country you’re going to, read the Lonely Planet guide and done some reading on the Internet about the weather, dress code, language and food. You think you’re ready to go, but wait, what about the impact of cultural differences on international development work? Did you think about that?
The process of international development brings into contact people from “the North” and “the South”. The ways they communicate, what they value, how they define development, are profoundly affected by their cultures. Yet these differences in cultural conditioning are often invisible to those engaged in development projects.
This workshop is an introduction to intercultural communication. Through discussions and case studies, participants will examine cultural values, expectations and assumptions and develop an understanding of how these elements can affect our work abroad and ability to communicate across cultures.
Knowledge Translation, Sustainability, Community Engagement
Objectives:
- To introduce the concept of community-driven development.
- To highlight challenges in global health as they pertain to community development.
- To discuss concrete examples of how a clinician can support a community’s development both abroad and here in Canada.
Speaker Biographies
Ms. Veronica Fynn
Veronica holds a BSc (Ghana), BA (UBC), MPH (Nottingham), LLM (York), and has completed two years of her PhD in Law at Osgoode Hall Law School. She is the Founder/CEO of EV Research Inc., where she works to reduce the 10/90 research and development gap between resource poor and advance countries. A specialist in interdisciplinary learning with emphasis on international law, public health, and social justice, Veronica has conducted research studies and consulted on several projects related to forced migration, sexual & gender-based violence, the rule of law, human rights and governance projects in at least a dozen countries in Africa, Europe, Euro-Asia and North America. She has worked with the Centre for Refugee Studies (CRS), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Toronto, the Provincial Government of British Columbia, and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Geneva. Veronica has extensive teaching experiences, having designed curriculum and taught courses in human rights, research, forced migration, public health and law. Veronica is the founder of Africa Awareness at UBC, the founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Internal Displacement, a co-partner of the Good Citizen Project and she sits on the board of several organizations including the World University Service of Canada and Flowers School of Technology in Germany. She has published two books, several articles and chapters on refugees, internal displacement, aboriginal rights, child soldiers and gender violence in Africa. Her current research is focused on (inter)national law: sexual and gender violence in post-war Liberia.
Dr. Videsh Kapoor
Dr.Kapoor completed all of her undergraduate training, including medical school at UBC and completed the UBC Family Practice Rural Residency Program. Practicing as a family physician in the Lower Mainland, Dr. Kapoor splits her time between a family practice in New Westminster and the Vancouver Airport where she does some travel medicine and occupational health in addition to primary care. She is the Director of the Division of Global Health and the Faculty Advisor of the Global Health Initiative. Currently she is the supervisor of four of the GHI projects and have traveled with the India Spiti project 3 times since it began in 2006. She is currently developing two new projects for students and residents in Nicaragua and Peru and will be going to the Nicaragua project site for the first time this April to begin the project. She is the UBC Faculty Chair of Global Health Curriculum Development for Undergraduate and Postgraduate Medicine and is working on developing a Global Health program to be integrated in the existing curriculum.
Go Global
Go Global is a key resource at UBC that develops and facilitates international learning opportunities through study, research and service learning. Our programs offer students transformational, experiential learning experiences that promote global awareness, meaningful engagement and cross-cultural understanding. Go Global also administers over $1.4 million in international learning awards and manages the Student Safety Abroad Policy. Go Global is running a Community of Practice (CoP) this fall, facilitated through the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT). During our first year, the CoP will focus on International Service Learning at UBC.
http://www.students.ubc.ca/global/index.cfm
Dr. Grant Charles
Dr. Grant Charles is Associate Professor and Chair of Field Education in the School of Social Work at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver). Prior to coming to the University of British Columbia, he worked in a variety of mental health, special education and child welfare settings. He has been the treatment director of a number of specialized community and residential treatment programs working with such diverse client groups as adolescent sexual offenders, Aboriginal adolescent solvent abusers and other hard to serve young people and their families. He has published extensively on issues relating to at-risk youth and professional practice. He is currently working on projects on the ethics of international service learning, student learning processes in international educational experiences, professional identity, interprofessional practice and supporting students in cross-cultural learning experiences.
Ms. Tasneem Damji
Tasneem’s extensive international experience ranges from implementing a school health education project in Pakistan, to facilitating workshops for teachers, health professionals and mothers to implement psychosocial activities for Albanian children and youth in a refugee camp in Bosnia, to providing appropriate training opportunities for local staff in Tajikistan. She also worked in the area of human resources, training and development at the Aga Khan Foundation in Tajikistan, facilitating workshops in the areas of health, education and rural development.
In another role, Tasneem coordinated a master’s level course in project planning and management, working with NGOs, regional governments and local communities, for which she developed case studies, educated facilitators on teaching styles and the learning culture of students in a post-Soviet society and provided student assistance. Tasneem’s interests lie in the cross-cultural issues associated with working in the field of international development and in particular, how people in the West can learn from people in developing countries. She is also passionate about making sure young people are prepared for the realities of working in this field.
Dr. Lynn Farrales
Dr. Farrales is a family physician based in Vancouver with an interest in refugee and global health. Her global health experiences have focused on community-based health programs in the Philippines. She has also traveled to Kenya as part of an R3 in Global Health at the University of British Columbia. Her home base is the New Canadian Clinic in Burnaby where she has an active interest in addressing health literacy in refugee health.
