Dear community,
my name is Johanna Böhm and I am a 25-year-old OT from Vienna, Austria. I want to spread the word about an incredible NGO that gave me the chance to explore community-based practice and actually became a second home and family to me. It is called Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos (NPH) and runs homes for abandoned and at-risk-children in nine countries in Central and South America. They currently have a lot of OT positions open in different homes! Every home is different, so I cannot speak for all, but in the following I give you a glimpse of my volunteer service and explain why I think it is such a great work opportunity for an OT.
In 2016-2017 I did 19 months of living and working at the NPH Honduras home. I lived and worked with about 20 other international volunteers, 300 children and teenagers and 200 Honduran employees. During the day I worked as an OT, mostly at the on-site school. My nights and every other weekend I helped caretakers with a group of 25 girls ages 3 to 7. The times with those girls were the most exhausting, happy, funny and emotional moments and were a big part of my life besides being an OT.
At school I was part of the special education department and had my own therapy room with lots of materials. My job was both assessment and treatment of children with learning difficulties, attention deficits, fine motor problems, behavioral issues, physical/intellectual disabilities, autism and more. Also, one day a week a fellow PT volunteer and I went to the capital where NPH has a house for children with more severe physical disabilities that need more special medical attention. Another part of my job was providing therapy to a group of elderly who also live in the home.
I always found this variety of work spaces/patients fascinating and refreshing and am very thankful for the chance to get in contact with so many different parts of the home through my work.
For my last 6 months though I decided to focus on preschoolers and early intervention. This kind of professional freedom as the only OT in the home was a real gift that I appreciated a lot. At the same time this freedom was also one of my biggest struggles. Especially deciding who needs and gets OT or not was hard for me, considering I did not have a lot of experience in assessing children. Thankfully there are other professionals at NPH that know the children and that you can consult and work together with, like a doctor, nurses, special educators, psychologists, social workers and usually volunteer therapists.
Apart from personal challenges there were obviously a lot of external factors that I had to adapt to: different style of parenting/disciplining, lack of resources (personal, material, time), different education/teaching system, other cultural values, different knowledge, etc. Some of those differences were annoying and frustrating sometimes but also a big learning opportunity for me. They also made me aware of the holistic view on the human and health I internalized in my OT studies and the importance of considering the cultural, social and physical environment of our patients.
The by far best thing about being an OT at NPH Honduras is that you are literally IN the daily life of the children all the time. You can do observations in class, at home, on the playground, etc. You can easily be in constant contact with their caretaker and their teacher, you can do interventions at home and evaluate the practicability of your ideas. And most importantly, you have lots and lots of opportunities to pass on your knowledge, give tips, train caretakers etc. to make your work as sustainable as possible.
With voluntourism in the Global South being a popular phenomenon these days it is important to me to stress that NPH is a locally-focused organization and volunteers usually have positions that for now cannot be filled by locals due to different reasons. NPHs volunteer program is well established and offers a variety of positions in health care, education, coordination and more, requiring a minimum service of 12 to 13 months.
Volunteering at NPH Honduras is more than doing your job, you become part of a community. I fell in love with that place, its people and all the friendships it has given me – so much that I visited the home in August. There are currently two OTs there, from Austria and Chile, but there are many other NPH homes in desperate need of OTs! If anybody is interested in learning more about NPH, their mission, volunteer opportunities or other ways to get involved with them, please visit their website or feel free to contact me with any questions.
https://www.nph.org/
https://www.nph.org/opportunities
