Chaparda 2023
By Emma Vaughan
This week sees a team of practitioners, clinic assistants and translators heading to Chaparda for our first visit since 2020. It is with much anticipation that we will make our way from our homes across the UK and meet up with the whole team on Saturday 7th of January. We have had much time to prepare for this trip and we are all ready to meet the challenge of the 3 weeks of work that lie ahead for us. We never know quite what we will find, who we will meet or how things will unfold but we go in good faith that we will be met with plenty of patients who are eager for our help and ready to embrace the wonderful benefits that acupuncture and its adjunct therapies can bring.
This year we will be making a concerted effort to blog our experiences in order to showcase the breadth and richness of our work in Chaparda. Look out for these blogs on World Medicine Instagram and here on our website.
Finally, every trip we make to India always serves as a reminder of how much support we have from so many people for both our projects abroad and at home in the UK. Some of that support comes in the way of admin and practicalities ( special shout out to Chris, Sally, Alison and Amir) and some of it comes in fundraising and grants. Recently we had an amazing donation of £5000 from The Clarkson Foundation for which we are enormously grateful. Sarah Clifford, one of our dedicated volunteers at Wapping was instrumental in facilitating this grant. Thank you Sarah, this has been invaluable – you are a wonderful friend to World Medicine.
We also want to say a special thank you to two exceptional fundraisers this year who have supported the work of World Medicine so wonderfully – Jude Blair and Amy Moore. Jude has put a huge amount of effort into delivering training courses to facilitate NADA practitioners in volunteering for World Medicine projects. This takes a lot of time and planning and has resulted in not only an increase in volunteers but very generous donations to World Medicine. Thank you Jude!
Amy, as some of you will know is part of our 2023 team. Sadly, Amy is unable to travel with us this time and we are sending her much love. Despite this Amy has raised a huge amount of money for World Medicine and has been a great advocate for our work through her commitment to volunteering in the UK in 2022, in Wapping. A superstar!!
And so back to packing, fretting over baggage allowance, worrying if I have packed enough teabags, who will win THE game…..
Emma is a World Medicine Trustee