Page 22 - BackSpace October 2017

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A moving start for new Madrid graduates
When Ricardo Fujikawa, Director of the Madrid Chiropractic College, first joined the RCU Escorial Maria Cristina to develop the curriculum for the chiropractic programme, he wanted to add service-learning as an important component.
THE CONCEPT of service-learning is the integration of meaningful community service into teaching and learning. In past years, graduates have been to the Amazon, Peru, Nepal, and now to Namibia. This is the RCU’s second year there and the experience has been great. Once registered with the Health Professions Councils of Namibia, the supervising faculty, the team works with the support of the Namibian Chiropractic Association (NCA) and in association with local NGOs. Dr Elga Drews, president of the NCA, is a great host. She organised all the logistics, including transportation, lodging, and meals. There are no words enough to thank her for her dedication towards this project and her commitment to the profession.
Namibia lies in the south-west of Africa, close to South Africa (from where it won independence in 1990), Botswana, Angola and Zambia. It has a 2,000km-long desert (Namib) and is sparsely populated. The capital is Windhoek and the outreach clinic is in Rundu, in the north east of the country, which has a population of 64,431 (out of a total of 2.4 million).
14 of the 20 new MChiro graduates travelled to Rundu. BACKspace asked some of them to keep diaries of the experience:
Javier Abad
I really didn´t know what to expect of the outreach clinic as we were headed to Rundu. It is an eight-hour drive from Windhoek and I was wondering what the mobile clinic would look like. We were 14 new graduates, one supervisor and Dr Drews, divided
into one van and a truck, with two trailers carrying all of our luggage, food, chiropractic equipment, tents and other camping gear. We camped in Hakusembe Lodge. It is located by the river Okavango that divides Angola from Namibia. Our clinic days were intense and I confess that I was a little jumpy when it came
to taking care of patients. It was
my first time touching people with tuberculosis, leprosy, malaria, AIDs and other infectious diseases. I
felt comfortable that Dr Fujikawa is also a physician with experience working as a MD in Kenya before becoming a chiropractor. He assured us that we would be fine and that gloves could be used in case of open wounds and skin lesions. On our way back, we passed by the Etosha National Park, and I could not believe what I saw: elephants in the wild, surrounded by packs of zebras, and even giraffes eating calmly by the road. What an experience!
Sofia Berenguer
I have always been a little shy and I confess that foreign languages are not so easy for me. Before going to see patients, we had a small training in the Rukwangali language. This language is used by
the people living around the Rundu area. It is hard to interview patients using an interpreter. It is important to connect with
22 BACKspace www.chiropractic-ecu.org October 2017