Lecturer Donna Pinter established that design in 2006 to give final-year visual communication students professional practice. Some of the studio’s best work featured in a retrospective Learning and Teaching Week exhibition in the Joanne Felk Gallery. Credit: Haley Forrester.
Village in Nepal to benefit from student’s Sunday hike
Ellyse Brooks
Bachelor of Arts student
Avondale College of Higher Education
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia
I bush-bashed from Swansea Heads, past Catherine Hill Bay and into Wybung Head on a hot and blowy Sunday. That’s 21 kilometres. I walked with containers of water over my shoulder alongside 20 other students from Avondale College of Higher Education. We walked for change. We walked for water.
Avondale students carried containers of water on their 21-kilometre Fit to Drink walk.
I almost caught myself complaining about the unbearableness of it all, then I had a flashback.
Four months before Fit to Drink, the name Avondale student mission club COSMOS gave to the walk, I tried to carry 30 litres of water on my head, Nepali-style. I could walk barely five metres while my 12-year-old friend walked with a full container at a steady pace. She does this every day. She held my hand as she showed me around her family’s home and its surrounds in the village of Hoxe east of the capital, Kathmandu.
My Development Field Experience classmates and I travelled to Nepal in June and July. We traversed 19 of its 75 districts to visit 15 villages, all beneficiaries of Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) projects. Hoxe would benefit from a COSMOS donation if the villagers developed a plan and received professional local advice to fund a water project.
Fit to Drink has raised more than $5000 for Hoxe. With further consultation and follow-up, COSMOS will help make the collection of safe drinking water an easier task for the villagers.
What did I learn from this uncomfortable coastal walk? We can all do something to change the world, one step at a time.
Nepalese women share maternal health message
Lawson Hull
Public relations intern
Avondale College of Higher Education
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia
Three women’s rights advocates have presented a seminar at Avondale as part of an Australian speaking tour to raise awareness of maternal health in Nepal.
Rama Basnet, with daughter Dr Angela Basnet and friend Samita Pradhan, meet with lecturer Brad Watson and students to discuss women’s health in Nepal. Credit: Paris Lawrence.
Studies indicate about 600,000 women in the landlocked country suffer from uterine prolapse, says one of the advocates, Dr Angela Basnet. Young marriages and heavy workloads, particularly while pregnant, are the two main causes. The cost of the medical procedure to permanently treat it: $300.
“We need to inspire change, particularly in rural communities, by raising awareness of uterine prolapse and by helping women suffering from it receive a second life in ways that respect our culture and traditions,” says Angela, a consultant physician for the Community Service Academy Nepal.
Education, for women and men, is one of the keys to success. It will “reduce the problem, not eliminate it, and open up opportunities to help more and more women,” says Samita Pradhan, co-founder of the Centre for Agro-Ecology and Development. She speaks highly of women in Nepal, despite the way they are marginalised, describing their resilience as the factor that “will ultimately lead to change.”
Samita’s not-for-profit entity, along with the entity for which Angela works, are partners of Asian Aid, which presented the seminar. Joshua Moses is one of its communication coordinators. “If people in the West were more globally minded about people in the East,” he says, “health issues could be far closer to being cared for.”
Ends lecturer’s week-long school-based intensive
An Avondale visual arts lecturer has helped staff members and students from a New Zealand primary school create an outdoor painting celebrating their Christian multiculturalism.
Teacher Joanne Andrews and Andy Collis framed by their mural.
The 4.8- by 2.4-metre mural by Andy Collis and the South Auckland Seventh-day Adventist School depicts a contemporary Jesus surrounded by children in a New Zealand native fauna and flora setting. The border borrows from traditional decorative symbolism to describe the creation story.
The unveiling came at the end of a week-long art intensive Andy, with wife Sally, delivered to the school’s 305 pupils and to its teachers.
But results at Eastern University Games mixed
Men’s basketball joins men’s touch football as automatic qualifiers for the nationals after strong showings at the Eastern University Games in Newcastle July 7-10. The former finished fifth—down from fourth in 2013—but qualified because three other teams had already done so. The latter went one better than this past year by winning bronze, although expectations were higher—the team, gold medal winners in division two at the most recent Australian University Games, led 4-0 in its semifinal before losing 5-4. Credit: Colin Chuang.
Avondale College of Higher Education