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Purikura fun with some life-long friends made at the INU Disaster Nursing Workshop Wow, what an amazing experience. I am eternally grateful for my hosts; the incredibly kind and considerate people of Hiroshima, who were all so welcoming and willing to go out of their way to assist me in any way possible.
- The 8-day INU Disaster Nursing Workshop was packed full of presentations, workshops, site visits, and cultural experiences to enrich our learning and trigger thoughts about the holistic approach required to build community resilience and effectively manage disasters from prevention through to recovery.
- Students were put into three groups and each group was assigned a disaster scenario of either earthquake, explosion or pandemic. Based on these scenarios each team was required to develop a disaster management plan for a housing complex in Hiroshima. Effectively communicating and problem solving with students from many international universities was a challenging task, especially with those where English was not their first language. However, our shared nursing mindsets and visions for stronger, healthier communities motivated us to collaborate and work on the task at hand.
- We were privileged enough to have our workshop occur during the 69th anniversary of the WWII atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6th 1945. Visiting the Peace Memorial Park and Museum, witnessing the Peace Memorial Ceremony and participating in the Peace Lantern Ceremony was a hugely emotional and overwhelming experience. The message taken from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial was not only to remember to lives lost in the atomic bombing, but to advocate for world peace, something that I feel has not been reverberated as powerfully in other memorials I have attended. It was an experience that will stay with me for the rest of my life. Thanks to the people of Hiroshima, I have come home with a completely different perspective on life.
