For John and Sally Padgett, heading to Nepal for a six-year stint feels a little like going home.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Dr Padgett, a GP, and Mrs Padgett, a physiotherapist, spent nine years working in Nepal in the 1990s. and in mid-May the Wagga couple will be heading to volunteer positions at a district hospital in Okhaldhunga, in the hill region to the east of Kathmandu.
They will be working with United Mission to Nepal, a Christian aid and development organisation based solely within Nepal.
Despite heading into a new place and a new challenge, the couple say it does a feel like a bit like going home.
They describe Nepal as being one of their "heartlands".
"It is another heart place for us. When we left at the end of the 1990s, we thought about the possibility that we might be able to go back again," Mrs Padgett said.
"We have been back a couple of times in the intervening years. We just love being there," Dr Padgett said.
"We've maintained friendships with both Nepalis and other ex-pats over that time," Mrs Padgett said.
The Padgetts learned to speak Nepali during their previous years in Nepal, but Dr Padgett admits their skills are a little rusty.
They will have the opportunity to brush up on these and other skills during a three-month training stint in Kathmandu before they head to Okhaldhunga.
Most of Nepal’s 30 million inhabitants live in rural villages in small towns. Access to modern health care is limited for these mostly subsistence farming communities, Dr Padgett said.
Robust reliable and continuing primary health care located within these communities has the potential to reduce much preventable disease, he said.
Dr Padgett has had a variety of roles working in Aboriginal health and medical education and more, for the past three and a half years, has been upskilling in obstetrics by working in maternity at Wagga Base Hospital.
Mrs Padgett has worked at Wagga Base since 2000 and for the past 12 years has specialised in lymphoedema treatment.
"We weren't sure if this would be possible to go to Nepal again, so we were looking at remote work in Australia as well," Mrs Padgett said.
In Nepal, mosquitoes carry filariasis, a major cause of lymphodema, and Mrs Padgett is looking forward to working with patients and other medical professionals.
For Dr Padgett, the work will be a combination of providing medical services and helping to train other doctors in a hospital that officially has 50-beds but caters to a wide community.
"The area we are going to is regarded as a remote hill region," he said.
