19
SPOTLIGHT
APR 2015
UMP
大學廣場
I
n late January 2015, I joined the field trip organized
by the Collaborating Centre for Oxford University and
CUHK for Disaster and Medical Humanitarian Response
(CCOUC) to Nanjiang
（南江）
Village in Guizhou Province
to deliver a health education intervention on ‘Food Choice’.
This was my second time participating as a field volunteer
of CCOUC. A friend asked me, ‘Haven’t you joined once
before? Why again?’ Yes, the works and settings were
similar but what mesmerizes me to volunteer again is the
process. The place I stayed, the people I met, the challenges
I faced are always brand new experiences to me.
Before delivering the health education to the villagers,
we needed to disseminate the news of the event in the
village. What really amazed me was the hospitality of the
villagers. Every time our team stepped into their houses,
the first thing they did was not asking why we were there
but taking chairs for us to sit; and when we were about
to leave, they would invite us to have lunch with them.
Not just one or two families but almost all families we
had visited welcomed us in this friendly way. Hardly can
you imagine the way they treat guests, especially total
strangers, when you live in a prosperous urban area.
We carried out two education sessions in the village. We
encountered some difficulties running the first session.
After the debriefing at night to review the first day
activities, all intervention team members held a meeting
in a room to discuss the rundown of the next intervention
and any improvement that could be made. This was the
most memorable part of the trip. Despite the fact that it
was already 11:30 pm and we had to wake up early next
morning, 11 team members committed themselves to
achieve the same goal of delivering a good education
session the next day. It was the passion and team spirit
that I love about this trip and also the reason I volunteered
again. And it turned out that the second intervention ran
with much improvement after lessons learnt from the
previous one.
Lectures can give you knowledge and skill, but they
cannot provide you with solutions to all problems that you
It’s Easier Said than Done
– A Public Health Field Trip to Guizhou
(Daniel Lam, BSc in Public Health / Year 3)
may encounter in the field. When you are in the field, you
need to think about different sorts of things like security,
site management and reactions of the audience, even the
changing weather conditions. All these field experiences
are unique and precious to my personal growth as well as
future career in public health.
Joining these trips keeps reminding me the importance
of public health and why I chose it as the major of my
undergraduate study at the very beginning. Knowledge
and skill may sometimes look simple on the book, but they
are often easier said than done.
Ethnic Minority Health Project
Organized by the Collaborating Centre for Oxford
University and CUHK for Disaster and Medical
Humanitarian Response (CCOUC,
), the
Ethnic Minority Health Project is an excellent platform
for ambitious students to transform knowledge gained in
classroom settings into practical solutions for complex
health problems in the real world. The project has five
major objectives:
1. To empower vulnerable communities in rural and
remote settings to prepare and mitigate the adverse
impact of natural disasters;
2. To bring science to the people by adapting technical
｀
know-how
´
developed in academic settings to concrete
practice in the field;
3. To develop human resources to work in rural and
remote communities by offering practice and field-
based trainings;
4. To raise global awareness of issues related to disaster
impact and preparedness among remote communities
in developing countries; and
5. To document empirical findings to support future
development of related intervention for other rural,
community-based health projects.
