Seminar Day

Hola from Lima!

After a very busy two weeks working with Vive Peru, our team departed Trujillo last night on an overnight bus to Lima. We are currently waiting to check-in to our hostel, so we figured this would be a good opportunity to give you all another update!

Last Friday in Trujillo, we held a seminar at Universidad Cesar Vallejo to educate local healthcare professionals about various topics in audiology. The two previous Northwestern SAA groups that worked with Vive Peru learned that audiology is not a distinct profession in Peru like it is in the United States. Instead, some aspects of hearing healthcare are distributed among various health professions (otolaryngology and psychology) while other aspects are largely neglected. Therefore, the goal of this seminar was to exchange information about audiology as a profession as well as give information about hearing healthcare that can be incorporated into the existing hearing healthcare system in Peru.

Shannon and Greg outside of the lecture hall, ready to give some presentations!

We began the day with a lecture from Jenna Browning-Kamins on an Introduction to Audiology. This included an overview of the battery of tests used to diagnose hearing loss. After fielding some questions, she then delivered another lecture on the Anatomy of the Ear. This included information about the peripheral and central hearing systems. Jenna had the audacity to do both of her presentations in Spanish, and the effort was certainly appreciated by the local professionals! The rest of the team worked with a translator, David, to present our lectures to the audience. 

Jenna Browning-Kamins

Next on the docket was a joint presentation about General Hearing Healthcare by Greg Horton and Shannon Switzer. This included information about ear hygiene, cerumen (ear wax), avoiding dangerously loud sounds, and protecting your head from injury (since your brain is actually what "hears" the sound it receives from your ears!).

After a quick break, Clare Furuta gave a presentation about Pediatric Audiology. This presentation focused on the specialized behavioral testing associated with children as well as the importance of early detection/intervention when a child has hearing loss.

Clare Furuta 

Greg Horton then took the stage again solo for a lecture about the importance of hearing conservation. Preventing hearing loss is important for ALL populations, but especially so for ones who do not have as much access to treatment for hearing loss (i.e. hearing aids and aural rehabilitation).

Greg Horton

Following a leisurely lunch break, Shannon Switzer gave a presentation about Communication Strategies. This lecture focused on different techniques people with hearing loss and their communication partners can utilize to communicate more effectively and efficiently. Communication strategies are important tools for people with hearing loss to use, especially when they do not have access to hearing aids.

Shannon Switzer

The last lecture of the day was by Dr. Jennifer Phelan who presented several pediatric case studies and emphasized the importance of a multidisciplinary team approach regarding hearing healthcare.

Jennifer Phelan, AuD

The seminar day concluded with an hour-long round table discussion where all five team members fielded a range of questions from the audience. We were thankful for all of the thoughtful questions that were asked during the round table as well as threaded throughout the seminar day. A topic that drew many questions was tinnitus, or ringing in the ears. Tinnitus was such a popular topic that we believe next year's team should make a special presentation about it. Additionally, the team members at Vive Peru have suggested live streaming next year's seminar so our lecture can reach an even larger audience.

Clare answers a question during the round table discussion

We also want to thank Rachel Jurkowski, the founder of Vive Peru, and David Lopez, our translator, for all of their help with communicating our ideas to our audience! 

David Lopez, our translator for the day! 

Our team with Rachel Jurkowski, founder of Vive Peru 

After the seminar day, we enjoyed dinner with our host family before boarding another overnight bus to Huaraz for our free weekend. Stay tuned for a couple more updates about our time in Huaraz and our second week in Trujillo!

Classroom Presentations and Hearing Screenings (First Batch)

Hola from Trujillo! Northwestern's student clinician team has been hard at work this week preparing for and conducting our classroom presentations and hearing screenings. We are all a little tired from our busy week, but so excited and grateful for the opportunity to practice audiology here in Peru. We are also currently feeling slightly nervous because today is the day we give a seminar on audiology to healthcare professionals (check back later for a blog post about it)! Here is a recap of what we got up to from Tuesday-Thursday this week.

Tuesday, August 16th

Today was spent preparing and reviewing materials for our classroom presentations, hearing screenings, and university seminar. Since we have spent the last nine months preparing for our time here, our preparation here in Peru has been very efficient and smooth. We worked alongside members of the Vive Peru organization to make our visions a reality. These pictures are just a quick snapshot of the many hours we spent on Tuesday, Wednesday evening, and Thursday evening working towards our goal of expanding awareness of hearing health across many ages and conducting efficient hearing screenings.

Outside Vive Peru Headquarters

Getting to work inside Vive Peru Headquarters

Greg and Jenna work with Janice from Vive Peru 

Jenna polishes her Spanish skills with Janice

To keep in step with the locals, we broke up our day of work by going back to our home stay for a large lunch prepared by our host mom, Mercy. It was unbelievably delicious, as are all of her meals as we have come to learn. On our way back to Vive Peru, we passed a poster containing all of our smiling faces, which was advertising our university seminar day.

After an evening of work, we left headquarters feeling ready to hit the ground running the next day.

We also took a trip to the grocery store in Real Plaza after dinner to get some local snacks. The store was enormous, brightly lit, and still bustling at 10pm.

Shannon's snacks

Jenna and her snacks (including chicken-flavored Lays chips)

Wednesday, August 17th

We woke up bright and early for our first day of putting our audiology plans into action! We spent the day at a local school Institucion Educativa Antonio Torres Araujo.

Our team! 

Our plan for the school was to teach the kids about how hearing works and why it is important to protect their ears from loud sounds. While these classroom presentations were occurring, small groups of kids were pulled from class to have their hearing screened. Today, Jen, Jenna, and Greg tackled hearing screenings while Clare and Shannon taught a room of enthusiastic 4th graders.

Jennifer Phelan, AuD instructing some kiddos for hearing tests

Greg conducting otoscopy

Jenna conducting otoscopy

Clare and Shannon use a tuning fork to teach about the energy in sound

Clare and Shannon use a thermometer to show how different sounds have different loudness levels

Shannon, Clare, and classroom 4A

Thursday, August 18th

Today, we arrived at the school even earlier to ensure we had enough time to screen every child in classes 4B, 5A, and 5B. Shannon and Clare got right down to work teaching classroom 4B while Greg and Jenna conducted hearing screenings.

Shannon and Clare with classroom 4B

We then reversed our team roles, with Clare and Shannon conducting hearing screenings while Greg and Jenna taught two 5th grade classes.

Shannon conducts otoscopy

Clare conducts otoscopy

Greg shows how sound creates vibrations that bounce off of the eardrum, like rice on a plastic-wrapped bowl

Jenna helps a kiddo match the everyday sound to the loudness on the thermometer

Greg and Jenna with classroom 5B

At the end of the day, we were all very happy with how much progress we made and the kids' great attitudes.

Our entire team with classroom 5A

We celebrated meeting our goals for the day by going to a nearby seaside town called Huanchaco for lunch. Huanchaco is known for its great surfing and hand crafted reed boats on the beach.

Enjoying the beach breeze

After walking down the beach and exploring some souvenir shops, we settled in for a leisurely lunch. In fact, it was our "goodbye lunch" for Dr. Jennifer Phelan since she needed to return to Chicago to keep providing hearing healthcare for her patients there. We had a great time eating ceviche made from fish caught from the ocean that afternoon and chatting about how much we had experienced in such a short amount of time. We are so thankful she was able to supervise our first week of clinical work and make extremely helpful recommendations for streamlining our screening protocol. We will miss her during our second week of work but will make her proud!!

After lunch, we piled in a taxi and returned to Vive Peru headquarters where we spent the evening preparing for our university seminar the next day. We had an early bedtime to ensure we were rested up for our next big day! We will cover the seminar in a separate blog post. Also, after all our work is done, we will make a blog post detailing exactly how many people we helped, what we learned about hearing healthcare in Peru, and how we will incorporate our findings from this trip into future Northwestern audiology teams at Vive Peru!

Vive Peru 2016 is Officially Underway!

Hola from Peru! Northwestern's annual Student Academy Audiology humanitarian trip to Peru is officially underway. A little about our trip: once a year, a team of student clinicians from the Doctor of Audiology program at Northwestern University travel to Truijillo, Peru for two weeks. During this time, we give a seminar to share our knowledge about audiology with the local healthcare professionals who currently provide hearing health services, but are not specialized in the field of audiology. The majority of our time is spent in local schools teaching school children from kindergarten through high school about the importance of hearing and hearing health. In addition to this educational outreach, this is the first year we have the resources to conduct hearing screenings for both school children and senior citizens! We are very excited to introduce this clinical component into our outreach, and hope our efforts this year will help expand the annual services we offer to the citizens in Trujillo. 

Now that we are settled into our host family's home in Trujillo, we will be able to keep you (our supporters) updated throughout our time here. So, without further ado, meet our 2016 Vive Peru Team! 

Jennifer Phelan, AuD
Shannon Switzer, Third Year Graduate Student
Gregory Horton, Third Year Graduate Student
Clare Furuta, Second Year Graduate Student
Jenna Browning-Kamins, Second Year Graduate Student

Saturday, August 13

After carefully packing our audiometers, otoscopes, and bug spray, we flew out of Chicago on Saturday evening and arrived in Lima at 5:30am.

Sunday, August 14 

We were greeted by a member of the Vive Peru team, Janice, who recognized us in the airport from some of the glamour shots we had sent her a couple months ago. We piled into a taxi and took a speedy ride through Lima and along the coast before arriving at the Dragonfly Hostel. While we were not staying overnight at the hostel, it was a great place for us to relax for the day before our overnight bus from Lima to Trujillo.

After lounging in the hostel, we went out to explore the Miraflores neighborhood of Lima.

We walked around Parque Kennedy, which is locally known as the "cat park" where locals and tourists like to spend time hanging out with the stray cats who call the park home.

After taking in the sights and sounds of the area, we settled into a cafe for a leisurely lunch and discussed some of our goals for the next two weeks.

We returned to the hostel for orientation with Janice from Vive Peru, and then went out with her for dinner. After dinner, we took another speedy taxi ride to the bus station, where we took an overnight bus to Trujillo from 9:15pm-6:15am. Every member of our team slept straight through the journey! 

Monday August 15th

We were picked up from the bus station this morning by taxi and taken to our home for the next two weeks. We are staying with a host family in their lovely, spacious home. Señora Mercy y Señor Jose own a small cafe, which is attached to their house. They have two children, one who is in univeristy in Trujillo, and one boy who is six years old. Senora Mercy treated us to a large, delicious desayuno with home-brewed coffee. In fact, it was so wonderful, we did not think to capture it in a picture. We had the morning off to recover from our traveling and spent it chatting with our host family.

After lunch, we went to the Vive Peru headquarters down the road from our host family's house. We had a meeting with the organizers of Vive Peru to review our itinerary for the next two weeks and discuss the logistics of our projects.

Following the meeting, we took taxis into the city centre of Trujillo where we admired the Cathedral and beautiful colonial buildings.

We followed-up our stroll around the city with coffee and dessert in a cafe called "La Llave" because of all the old keys it displays on its walls. 

We then returned home to our neighborhood and went to a bar to sample Peru's famous Pisco Sour drink. We then retired back to our home stay to rest up for our first full day of work at the Vive Peru headquarters.

Thank you again to our supporters, and we will keep you all in the loop as our hearing wellness project progresses here in Trujillo!