00:00I went to do six months volunteer work. Just had always wanted to do it and thought I would
00:09come back to Australia and then get a proper job as my dad always said. But I got spellbound by
00:16the local Karen and Burmese staff thinking that I had something to offer but I would say they
00:23have taught me much more about being a good human than anything I've been able to transmit to them.
00:32So in the last 31 years that I've lived and worked at the Thai Myanmar border we've done
00:41world-class excellent research in a low resource setting. We have provided humanitarian health
00:48care to marginalise people at the border and how have we done that? We have empowered local staff
00:56to become midwives, lab technicians, sonographers, social scientists to be working for their own
01:05people. Most of our staff never got a chance to finish school to do the studies they wanted to
01:13do because of the breakdown in health and education in Myanmar. So seeing those people the colleagues
01:21I work with every day manage a complicated delivery like a midwife in Australia could do or the midwife
01:29in Australia might have to call the doctor but we don't have that many doctors. Our midwives we expect a
01:35lot and they do great quality work it's fantastic. At the time that I arrived in 1994 malaria was killing
01:45one in a hundred pregnant women that's a huge mortality from a preventable disease. A pregnant woman's
01:53much more vulnerable to malaria so we we worked really hard to try to align the treatment of the
02:00non-pregnant with the pregnant. That work that was done on malaria across a decade has become the
02:07mainstay of the current treatment for the World Health Organization. So we have saved lives we would
02:14like to save more. This work means so much to me but also the people that that I work with they're all as
02:24passionate and they're all working so hard to try to reduce mortality keep malaria at bay it feels
02:32meaningful to be able to support it.
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