I think the water that I am drinking here is making me unwell, I've spent the day in bed with a funny tummy and other people have experienced the same thing. It's bottled water but its been treated here in Chiang Mai so perhaps I will drink imported water from now.

I'm nearly at the end of my placement and I feel that I have experienced everything that I came here for. It has been a wonderful experience, I have leant so much and watched so many surgeries and procedures and witnessed five healthy babies being born into the world. But I still don't know what it is I want to study, I am very interested in working with women and I think that working with pregnant women and newborns would be such a rewarding job but I think that there are a lot of unnecessary procedures conducted during childbirth and that, for some women causes a traumatic experience because of the way that they are treated. I have seen that here, women have been told off for begin too loud during labour, there have been 10+ people in the labour room, more if two women are birthing at the same time, their partners are not allowed in the room so there is no comfort for the woman, nobodies hand to hold, when a mother is giving birth there will be a doctor with her hands on the inside of the woman stretching her birth canal and pulling the baby out so that she will give birth quicker, 80% of women have episiotomies which I think are unnecessary a lot of the time. And after the baby is born the placenta is then pulled from the mothers womb before it has properly detached. The theory here is that the quicker the birth, the quicker the recovery and the mother can look after her baby sooner. I disagree. There have been some absolutely incredible inspiring moments here but there have been moments where I have wanted to provide comfort and be a hand to hold more than anything in the world.