Sonny Balu
Vandegrift High School

To address this critical healthcare need at Haiti, April Watkins from Austin, Texas who is a clinical nurse, visits Haiti every year with other medical professionals to help the people in need as part of the medical relief mission. The medical team sets up mobile clinic in rural places where people live in extreme poverty with no access to clean water.

I visited Haiti from June 3, 2017 to June 10th, 2017 along with April Watkins and her team. We stayed at Leogane which is 26 miles south west of the capital Port-au-Prince. As part of our duties, we set up mobile medical clinic in different locations (churches, schools, and an orphanage) at 20 miles distance form Leogane.














Our team consisted of 20 members including doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and volunteers. We spent around 10 to 11 hours every day, seeing patients and packing medications. Every day the medical clinic was very organized and we would see around 200 to 300 patients. Each patient was given a ticket and called to be seen by doctors or nurses, and then would be sent to different stations based on their conditions for further examination. After they had been seen, they were prescribed medications for illnesses such as hypertension, diabetes, skin infections, and malaria and so on and sent to pharmacy to collect medicines. At pharmacy, they were given the medications with instructions on when and how to take it.

I worked mostly in the pharmacy counting pills and verifying the prescription from the doctors and assisting pharmacist as needed, and in spare time I would observe how other nurses, and doctors would treat patients. The thing that I liked the most in Haiti was the patients who were very nice and grateful for what we were doing. Another thing that I liked was the mangoes and the sugar cane, they were delicious, and I had good time bonding with the translator and playing basketball with locals. Overall, I was inspired by our medical team on how well they were treating Haitians with the supplies that they had.

I visit India often to visit my extended family, and decided to conduct a week-long soccer camp in June 2016 at local school for low income families funded by the Govt of India. All the kids in the school knew about soccer and had seen games on TV, but had never played soccer before and did not know the rules of the game.The one thing they had was their eagerness to learn and play the game after their school time.I was convinced that teaching them soccer will give them an ability to be physical fit, learn how to play together as a team and thus learn to work as a team.

The high school kids were selected by their eagerness and physical ability to play, they were divided into two teams each consisting of 11 players for a total of 24 players. The players were also eager to participate since they each got new soccer uniform, shoes and a personal soccer ball which will be theirs to keep after the completion of the camp.










The camp was 5 days long, for the first 4 days we practiced drills every day for 2 hours and had a scrimmage for one hour and on the 5th day we had a game day. The boys were eager to play every day and were enthusiastic to learn. The game day was a blast at it was highly competitive. The boys who were trained at soccer camp mentioned that they had fun, and were now clear on soccer rules, understand the need for physical fitness, discipline and to practice the drills to be successful in a sport or in any sport career. At the end of the training, I felt the boys had picked up soccer skills and the daily routine of warm up before the scrimmage. It taught me organizational skills where I learnt how to take an idea/ concept and see it through completion. Overall, I enjoyed my time teaching, made so many new friends and that was worth my time spent.