
Issue No 66		11 August 2000

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Unions

Mission Possible

By Julie Venamore - New South Wales Nurses Association

From Cambodia to Kyrghyzstan, from Malawi to Mozambique, this is one nurse who accepts certain missions where life is on the edge, and she loves it.

Helle Poulson Dobroyd has an abiding philosophy that takes her to places that don't most people would avoid 'like the plague' when planning a trip overseas. That philosophy is that there is a basic human right of health for everyone. The Lamp caught up with her between Mozambique and Sri Lanka.

Ever since her first overseas mission to Thailand, Helle has been well and truly hooked, 'It got under my skin, nothing was ever the same'. Talking with Helle is quite a heady experience as she talks about her passion for her work in third world countries, some with Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) and some without. Her great love is working in the area of HIV and this has taken her to Kyrghyzstan in central Asia and Malawi in Africa.

In Kyrghyzstan Helle worked with sex workers. Although syphilis had tripled over the 90s, the country had not seen a lot of input from other countries so it was not 'AIDS jaded' and the workers were thankful and thirsty for knowledge. MSF was the first organisation that paid attention to sex workers in this country and the project was successful. 'We looked at the best way to target these women with safe sex messages. It was fantastic work, I had a great group of women to work with.'

AIDS has devastated the tiny country of Malawi. Life expectancy is 57 years, but it is expected to fall to 36 years by 2005 because of the AIDS epidemic. Helle worked with children orphaned by HIV. Of a population of 13 million, 600,000 children were orphans. 'It is a former British colony colonised by Scottish Presbyterians and is somewhat conservative and prudish.

This contributes to the major problem they have here. The government has not taken up the HIV problem in an aggressive way, unlike countries like Thailand and Uganda. It is believed that only bad people have HIV but with an incidence of 1 in 3 with HIV, there is an obvious problem with double standards.'

The job was to set up a counselling service for the guardians of the orphans. She re-members one woman who had 13 siblings to take care of, so she was more interested in how she was going to feed these children rather than how to stop getting the di-sease. 'This is rapidly becoming a country without adults. There were these twins named Danny and Johnny and they were the head of a family. They had three younger brothers and lived under the table in the local market. Danny and Johnny were six years old.'

AIDS is not treated in Malawi. 'There are no fancy drugs. All I had to work with was a few Panadol, a few antibiotics, some anti-fungal creams and that's it. We made the most of natural products and had some success with the sap of the frangipani tree for herpes zoster. It seemed to heal the herpes really quickly and also prevented the post-hepatic neuralgia.'

Helle has always been a feminist but came back from Africa an avowed feminist. She believes that HIV is a feminist issue because women are more at risk of contracting HIV than men. Women are powerless to do anything about their partner's sexual behaviour in Malawi. Malawi manhood was defined by their sexual behaviour so as soon as the men got a little money, off they went to the beer hall, the beer girls and the prostitutes.

If a woman was widowed then she automatically became the property of her brother-in-law and he could do as he wished. Perhaps he would take her in as another wife, if she was good looking, or he may take her property and kick the women and children out onto the street, if she was ugly.'

Most at risk of contracting HIV were the young women who were constantly compromised by men. Because of AIDS, men preferred sex with virgins. In a place where poverty and the promise of food or even a pencil or a book could buy sex, young women often fall victim to school teachers.

Helle's nursing career began as a psych nurse at Callan Park and her Australian experience has been pre-dominantly community mental health at Darlinghurst in Sydney and working with HIV. Her first mission was to Thailand where she worked with Cam-bodian refugees. 'There was a very high suicide rate because they had come through the Pol Pot regime, had seen their families slaughtered and had absolutely nothing.'

She later worked as a community psychiatric nurse with Aboriginal communities for a few months in central Australia. 'I really enjoyed that a lot. I think bush nurses are fantastic. When I was out there, these nurses thought my life's work had been glamorous, but the work of the bush nurse is very understated. I would love to do what they do but simply don't have the skills because I'm not general-trained.'

General training may have helped her a little in Mozambique, but with her work in the cholera camps from Christmas to June this year, Helle rapidly became an expert. She was stationed in Maputo where it was particularly bad because the floods had destroyed what little sanitation existed. On arrival, there were over 1000 admissions a week to the cholera centre.

'People were just coming in and dropping, they were so massively dehydrated.' Because cholera is resistant to antibiotics, the treatment has simply rehydration, and the Mozam-bique treatment was 'the infusion' rather than oral fluids. Cannulation was very much hit and miss to the extent where arms had been amputated. Veins were difficult to find but determination by the local nurses to get the infusion going created havoc.

'I remember one 25-year-old woman. They couldn't find a vein and were at both arms until 3 in the morning. She tolerated the incessant needle jabs without complaint, but then, no one ever complained.'

With Helle's experiences in third world countries, she has developed very strong views about Australia's track record with international aid.

'We should be a lot more generous in what we give to other countries, especially to those in our sphere of influence such as the Pacific. I was horrified to come home from Kyrghyzstan to see Timorese people chaining themselves to gates so they wouldn't be sent back. So meanspirited of the Australian Govern-ment - a government that procrastinated ad nauseum about having a presence in East Timor; finally took action and sent a peacekeeping force and then what. Howard et al reaped the publicity. They huffed and they puffed, they patted themselves on the back and and then the proclamation,'Well it's over now so you can go back to where you came from.'

And when it comes to indigenous people in this country, we just haven't got it right according to Helle. 'The bush nurses I talked about earlier, they see worse things than I've seen yet they are working within a system that shouldn't be like that. When it comes to health, sanitation, hygiene etc, these nurses are working under third world conditions. It's appalling. When I was working in Alice Springs, the bureaucrats stopped the funding for a low-cost program teaching nutrition to aboriginal mothers. The program did so much good and it cost peanuts. The health status of Australia's aboriginal people is a scandal, and just look at what our 'altruistic' government does to them.

Before Helle rushed out the door to get ready for yet another mission, this time in Sri Lanka, I asked her about working for MSF. 'One of the things I really like about them is that their funding largely depends on private donors so they are not beholden to any government. That's terrific because that allows you to be a worker and witness. MSF encourages you to be an advocate for the people, you can speak out, if you wish, against any atrocities or any infringements against human rights.'

And finally, well of course she would urge any nurse contemplating similar adventures to make the move. 'It's a great experience for any nurse. It broadens your experience in so many ways, technically because you get to do things you don't do in Australia but you also get some wonderful instant rewards. Like the child with cholera who arrives unconscious and three days later is giggling and smiling.' 'I really am hooked, aren't I?'

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Issue 66 contents

Interview: Shifting Sands
Michael Crosby Joint Director of the ACTU Organising Centre talks to Workers Online about the changing nature of union power, 'use it or lose it' coverage and how the ALP will have to deal with a transformed union movement.

Unions: Mission Possible
From Cambodia to Kyrghyzstan, from Malawi to Mozambique, this is one nurse who accepts certain missions where life is on the edge, and she loves it.

Economics: A Progressive Alternative
Andrew Scott outlines a policy approach for an ALP Government that aims to deliver social as well as economic progress.

International: Unions Back International Seafarer Deal
Shipping union representatives from 56 countries have decided to back a pioneering international collective bargaining agreement with ship employers.

Politics: Apolitical Myth
Over the last ten years one story about public interest in politics has found resonance, especially in the US. It suggests that people are no longer interested in political issues. Researchers from the Demos Foundation put this claim under the microscope.

Satire: Elaine Nile retires citing victory in "War on Masturbation"
There were emotional displays and many tributes paid today as Elaine Nile, Christian Democrat MP of 12 years standing, announced her retirement from the Parliament.

Review: Pure Shit
The 1970s Aussie drug classic, Pure Shit - a 70s Australian style Trainspotting - is being dusted off for a one-off showing at the Chauvel.

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