The 7 Natural Wonders of the World!

According to Wikipedia, the 7 Natural Wonders of the World include:

• Harbor of Rio de Janeiro
• Mount Everest
• Aurora
• Parícutin volcano
• Victoria Falls
• Grand Canyon
• Great Barrier Reef

I am excited to say that I have crossed two of those off my list! First was the Grand Canyon in October 2010:

And now the Great Barrier Reef in June 2011! I am so lucky to be living in beautiful, sunshiney Queensland--home to one of the top 10 beaches of the world (Whitehaven Beach) and one of the 7 natural wonders of the world (Great Barrier Reef). Not too shabby!

To kick off a much needed 6 week holiday from uni in between semesters, my boyfriend flew to Brisbane from Los Angeles and we headed north toward warmer weather so we could sail/snorkel the Whitsunday Islands and snorkel the Great Barrier Reef. This is me in Airlie Beach, the closest beach on mainland Australia to the Whitsunday Islands. 

Beautiful sunset over Shingley Harbor. 

From Airlie, we took the Whitehaven Express for a day cruise out to Whitehaven Beach on Whitsunday Island. Along the way we stopped at Hook Island for a bush walk to this amazing lookout point. In the background is Whitehaven beach. The water was just so amazingly turquoise and the sand so sugary white!

This is my view while laying on Whitehaven Beach. It was beautiful with the docked boats and the white sand under my toes, however since it is still Winter, it was a bit windy and chilly to be laying in a bikini or swimming in the surf.

On our 3rd day in Airlie Beach, we hiked around Conway National Park to the top of Mount Rooper.

In the background, you can see some of the Whitsunday Islands we had just been sailing around the day prior!

 

At the top of Mt. Rooper there was a wooden tower you could climb up to get the very best view of the Whitsundays! 

After our stay in Airlie Beach, we hired a car and drove (well, Doug drove...) 7.5 hours up the Queensland coast, through miles and miles (or kilometres and kilometres) of sugarcane fields to Cairns. On this Aussie roadtrip, we were lucky enough to pass one of "Australia's Big Things" on the side of the road--a big mango! There are apparently over 150 of these gigantic objects on the side of the roads throughout Australia, I guess constructed to give weary roadtrippers a little bit of a thrill every now and then, and a good group photo opp. They range from many other giant fruits, to a big axe, to a giant chook (chicken), a big bench, a big mosquito, a giant gold panner?, a big stubby (beer bottle?), and to even a giant Scotsmen, which was the original one built in Adelaide in 1963. Only thing I can really say about it is... it's definitely big!

The beautiful Cairns "lagoon"

On the MV Osprey boat... trying to pretend like I wasn't freezing my booty off before my first viewing of the GBR (which you can see the edge of in the water behind me!). Doug and I managed to avoid seasickness on the 1.5 hour rocky boat ride out by eating our body weight in ginger candies and tablets, plus taking these ginger-based pills provided by the boat staff. However, we failed to be so prudent for the way home and after the complimentary wine and cheese platter came around, we were not feeling so well. But that's ok, at least it was the way home and not BEFORE seeing the reef!!

Doug at the reef! 

Me on my way to the reef... 

Some locals and/or tourists claim that the only way to "do" the Great Barrier Reef is to scuba dive... however, certain parts of it are so shallow that you can see some really colorful, amazing stuff from just snorkeling along the water's surface. So I disagree with these naysayers of snorkeling! I am very content with having just snorkeled, especially since I did not want to risk another popped eardrum--that is not the way I want to learn about the Australian healthcare system during my time here.

It's really impressive we managed to take this dorky self-photo of ourselves while underwater! (Please note Doug's half-filled snorkel mask hahaha).

I am so happy Doug bought this amazing underwater camera specifically for this trip. We have entire videos of us snorkeling, for anyone who really wants to see what it was like! However, to watch them without getting seasick, you may need to eat several ginger tablets beforehand...

 We saw so many colorful fish--above are some UCLA themed blue and yellow ones! My favorite were these really large rainbow things! I wish I knew anything about tropical fish and could give you a better description or some scientific name, but they were just bright, rainbow fish that were... bigger than a breadbox? Whatever they were, they were my favorite. However, I didn't get any good pictures of them...they all turned out looking blue instead of rainbow from the water's reflection, I guess.

On our second day in Cairns, we decided to save some money and create our own one-day tour of Daintree Rainforest and Cape Tribulation. An hour past Cairns, we stopped for lunch here in quaint Port Douglas.

This is us at Alexandra Lookout in Daintree Rainforest. I think the background is Cape Tribulation. We spent the afternoon walking along (nearly) white sand beaches, mangrove forests, and in the rainforest/jungle that jutted out to the sand. Everything was so green and unspoilt!

Ok, now 5 more natural wonders to go! No doubt, I will cross off all 7 in time :) 

Walking in a winter wonderland...in June!

Yes, it was very weird to realize it was Memorial Day, but yet a Tuesday and the beginning of winter... being in the Southern Hemisphere is a constant inner battle for me to try to get a hold of what time of the year it is, the weather, the date, the time, etc etc. Everything my body senses doesn't ever match the calendar. I'm just in a constant state of flip-flop, but I like it. About the time I'll just be getting used to it... I'll be back in the US and having to convert my brain and intuition back to the other Hemisphere!

Anyway, for 3 weeks in June Brisbane has this huge downtown Winter festival--with an ice skating rink, free hot tea, and a snow drop!

See the tiny flakes of snow in front of the King George Square clock tower?! It was pretty cool and happened to the be one of the coldest day on records in the past decade in Brisbane, so the snow actually fit (it was still only a record low of 60 degrees, but it felt WAY colder). However, in an attempt to play wintery music, they ended up playing "Winter Wonderland" and songs that are just true blue Christmas Carols. That got a bit weird for me and the 2 other Ambassadorial Scholars from the US...

Last weekend, we had Amy, an Ambassadorial Scholar from the Canada/US to Wellington, New Zealand visiting Brisbane. Like the good hosts we are, us Brisbane Ambassadorial scholars had to take a time out from my friend's birthday festivities to take a dorky Rotary Ambassadorial Scholars group photo! From left to right is Amy, Kyle, me, and Morgan.

Meeting the Elders

With my bachelor's degree in development studies and my own family's distant Cherokee heritage, I have an extra special interest in indigenous health, and the complexities of how to develop underdeveloped populations within some of the richest, most developed countries. After several meetings and attempts to conduct a research project in a local aboriginal community for my master's degree in place of a completely coursework master's degree, I had just about given up on my goals of being able to get some fieldwork experience in an Aboriginal community. Faculty that I met with at the UQ School of Population Health explained how difficult it is due to many ethics clearances and with my limited time here, it would be near impossible for me the get the clearances and connections necessary to make this happen.


However, leave it to Rotary to defy that underwhelming feedback from uni! I still will not be able to conduct a project or write a thesis for my master's since I'm in the accelerated 1 year master's program, but I already have been able to start volunteering in Inala, and just getting the hands-on experience, being a bit of a contributor to the community, and making the friendships and memories is really all I care about. Inala is about 20-30 minutes outside of Brisbane city and was originally created as a low-income community... I guess like "The Projects" of any major American city. It is known to be beautifully multicultural (the best Vietnamese food in the country and home to many Aboriginals, as it is located on Jungara land) yet tragically poverty, substance abuse, and crime-ridden. Thanks to Rotarian Carla Tromans from the Planetarium club, I was put in contact with the Smith Family (development partnership brokers), who put me in contact with their employee, Lyn Manners, so I could get out into the community.


Lyn Manners is one of the liveliest ladies you'll ever meet--great story teller with a hearty, raspy laugh, has the stereotypical sing-songy cadence and Outback lingo of the quintessential Australian, and is a fair-skinned, blue-eyed Narangga woman (Aboriginal clan from South Australia). She was kind enough to pick me up from my apartment and give me a tour of Inala last week, including introducing me to the President of the Elders Council of Inala. When I heard that in order to abide by cultural protocol I would be meeting the community Elders before I could attempt to volunteer or get involved, I was a bit nervous wondering what sort of rituals and questioning this would entail...maybe a smoke ceremony? What if I choke?! However, it was so laidback and friendly, and you wouldn't otherwise know it was associated with such a culturally-centered community--it merely involved chatting on some benches outside the Elders' meeting house with Auntie Pam (President of the Council of Elders) while her coworkers took a smoke break and morning tea. I knew I was in once Auntie invited me to come to a teen suicide focus group meeting the following week after I said I was studying international public health, and indeed I went.


This focus group meeting was yesterday, and there was so much for me to digest from it, from the verbal discussions all the way to the subconscious/unspoken stuff, too. I won't bore you all with too many details since I'm not sure everyone else is as obsessed about cultural idiosyncracies as this social sciences grad student is, but here are some of my interesting notes:

• In an Aboriginal community, Elders are the older people of the community who are well-respected, who are informally nominated to be the de facto problem-solvers of the community. Although it ends up like a full-time job as a community leader, mentor, and event planner, they are completely unpaid and do it as a traditional duty. Elder males are called "Uncle" and females are called "Auntie," which is why I was referring to Auntie Pam as Auntie Pam. They are the grandmothers and grandfathers of the community.
• Adults (age 30s-50s) who are the generation below the Elders are referred to as "Brother" or "Sister" and "Sister-girl". For example, when someone asked the meeting leader where they could get certain paperwork, he responded saying "Go see a Sister-girl for that one". 
• Although each Aboriginal clan has their own language, there is somewhat of an Aboriginal pidgin dialect many adhere to. For example, anything involving death is referred to as "sorry-business". You can't actually discuss it specifically, and for several months after someone has passed you can't say their name or it holds back their spirit from going where it's supposed to go.
• This meeting was called together because in less than 2 months, 3 young people in the community (between age 15-24) had committed suicide, and something needed to change. Much of the focus group discussion involved the fact that although many Aboriginals feel there aren't enough government services and help for them out there, there really is more than is necessary. The problem lies in that such services are not culturally specific nor culturally relevant to Aboriginal people so they go unused. Health services, especially effective mental health services, require the employing of Aboriginals who can help Aboriginals. While from the perspective of an outsider this may seem like reverse racism, it's not meant to be exclusive of white people, but simply inclusive of Aboriginals. Only fellow Aboriginals can understand the plight of a fellow Aboriginal, to understand their intergenerational burden of lost land and lost identity. As one middle aged man explained after about 20 minutes of across the room bickering over which sector of the local or national government, or the educational system, or the health infrastructure, was to blame for the poor mental health of teen Aboriginals, this "have Aboriginals help Aboriginals" strategy will be a way to stop this intergenerational trend of Aboriginals blaming everyone else for their problems and to become accountable for themselves. It was really interesting to see the shifts in ideas and opinions throughout the room and throughout the 75 minute meeting. In the end, I think they really developed some good strategies to get started, which include about 9 peer mentors called "Future Leaders" and 8 adult "Community Leaders" who will help anyone who volunteers to be put on a "watch" list.

Ok I'm sure after that last long-winded paragraph, most of you readers have checked out by now and just want some photos. I don't have any from Inala, except for this one of the Torres-Strait Islander flag and the Australian Aboriginal flag. 

Lyn has some more uplifting, cultural events planned for me to attend in the future so I will post pictures of those then. I am really disappointed I will be out of the country for NAIDOC week, which is the first week of July and Aboriginal communities across the country all put on festivals to celebrate their culture. For anyone who wants to learn more about NAIDOC, visit: http://www.naidoc.org.au/

Semester ONE is DONE!

I realize it has been over a month since my last update! I am so sorry--but man, time flies when you're living in the library. And I thought I holed myself up in the library a lot as an overachieving undergrad?!! Oh no, grad school is ten times worst, and it's not just to be an overachiever but just to stay afloat! I am relieved to say that I have one last final assignment to submit and then FREEDOM!!! For 6 whole weeks. It really is crazy, though, how time flies! 


There were a few (very few...) moments I emerged from the depths of the library and my Pubmed database researching--and all of those were related to Rotary! I presented to the Rotary Club of Brisbane Planetarium and the Rotary Club of Brisbane High Rise. The Planetarium club meets at the botanical gardens below Mt. Coot-tha and it was a cheerful, fun morning! The High Rise club was also great and their venue is just amazing, as they meet downtown in the old Polo Club building.

The Planetarium Club proxy-President and I exchanged Rotary banners, and they also thanked me for my presentation with a bottle of Australian wine! Nice! However, I ended up having to go straight to uni from the meeting and ended up carrying the wine bottle around with me alllll day--into lecture, into the bathroom, into the library with it propped up on my desk. I got a lot of funny looks, and unfortunately since I was in study mode, I couldn't "lighten the load" of the bottle haha.

Here is a picture (from my handy dandy mobile) of the historical Polo Club in the heart of downtown on my walk to the presentation.

In May, I also attended the Rotary Peace Fellows Seminars. At the end of the 1.5 year Peace Fellowship, the fellows all give a 30 minute presentation on their AFEs (applied fieldwork experience), which is usually the same topic they write their dissertations on. (AFEs are about 2-3 months where the peace fellows go abroad and work within a community for their master's program and the Peace Fellowship funds it and requires it.) It was a really great day--there was a short documentary video on child labor in Vietnam, as well as a powerpoint on community development in Sierra Leone, among a whole entire day of others. Each presentation was so diverse and engaging. 

However, the best part of the day for me was actually not written into the day's agenda. During an intermission, the new incoming Peace Fellows introduced one another. Ertla (from Iceland) introduced Abdi, and explained a bit about his life (I feel since it was announced in the seminar that it is ok to share these details with others, I hope this is alright). Abdi was born in Somalia and was forced to live in Somali refugee camps in Kenya for 9 years until his family could be resettled in Canada when he was a teenager. Life was a bit tough in these refugee camps, to say the least--he never owned a pair of shoes until he was 15, as well as never once did he celebrate his birthday. The day of the Peace Fellows seminar happened to be his birthday and because he was so used to not celebrating it, he didn't even realize it when he woke up. Ertla asked us all to sing the traditional "Happy Birthday" song to Abdi, as it would be the first time anyone had ever sung that in honor of him. The whole audience of a few hundred people sang, and I'm not sure there was a dry eye in the room as in return Abdi had the hugest smile on his face, and humbly put his hands over his heart and just kept nodding in gratitude. It was a really poignant moment--a good life lesson that will help me remember to cherish the little, simple things in life. Like even an off-pitched "Happy Birthday" song!

I want to extend a special thank you to Suzanne Quintner, from the Planetarium club, who kindly gave me a ride to the Peace Fellows event. It saved me nearly an hour in time that would have been spent on 3 different buses to get to St. Lucia at that early of an hour on a Saturday!

Another thank you goes to the same Suzanne, as she arranged for my visit to the Royal Children's Hospital school. The Royal Brisbane Hospitals make up the biggest hospital in the Southern Hemisphere, and the Royal Children's Hospital (which is where my UQ library is and right next to where my UQ classes are at the UQ Medical School) has an amazing school system for children who have to spend prolonged periods in the hospital, and/or the siblings and children of patients in the hospital. I was able to have morning tea with one of the teachers, Jan McKay, who also is a Rotarian from the Windsor club. Programs like these sadly get overlooked in a lot of public health courses, but I learned a lot from just my quick visit! What a great program for allowing children who are battling an illness or enduring other hardships to maintain a bit of normalcy in their lives and still be able to go to school, and to learn, explore, and play.

With my RCH school tourguide, Rotarian Jan McKay

The only other thing I can really tell you about May unless you want to learn about biostatistics, epidemiology or Chagas disease in Latin America, is that Rotary really makes it such a small world out there! My Rotary hosts, Brian and Cheryl, went on a trip around the world in May. Not only were they able to get a personalized tour from my boyfriend, Doug, during their short time in Washington, D.C., but they also met up with so many random people from my childhood and life in Visalia while they were at the International Rotary Conference in New Orleans. I have never laughed so hard as when I received a text message from Brian Springer, my BRISBANE Rotary host counselor, that said "Hi from Dr. Schneider"...my VISALIA dentist I've known since I was a toddler! They also had dinner and drinks on Bourbon St. with my 8th grade drama teacher, my preschool teacher, as well as many other family friends. Apparently Brian and Cheryl have come back to Oz bearing several interesting Kelli stories... yikes! Too funny!

For any Australia Rotarians reading this, you will recognize my host, Brian, second from the left in the back. For any Visalia Rotarians reading this, you will recognize my preschool teacher, past District Governor, and one of the Ambassadorial Scholarship interviewers, Nina Clancy, right in front of Brian. Now that's what makes Rotary so cool! That... and the fact that because of PolioPlus, there are only 4 remaining polio-endemic countries! (But hey, that's just coming from a dorky public health grad student...)