Farewell dinner - Ingleburn Rotary Club Hosts

Hosted By Campbelltown Mayor Paul Lake

This evening a special reception was held at the Campbelltown Municipal Building for the visiting Vocational Training Team.

Our first sighting of Roos !

Visiting the Canadian High Commission

District Conference

The District Conference was an informative and enjoyable event. The guest speakers included some of the leaders in research in the mental health field as well speakers and plenarary's in Rotary's Five avenues of service.
Sunday's Youth and New Generations was particularly inspiring. The Team's presentation on Sunday was well received and there were many questions and comments following to the team.
One of the key speakers was Penny LeGate who spoke on Rotary's Last Mile in the eradication of Polio. Her speech was inspiring and Penny is a lovely and engaging lady who we had the pleasure to spend a few nights with during our week in the Sydney area.
On Sunday afternoon we attended a Citzenship Ceremony where three Canadians became Australian Citizens including Dr. Alexandra Mariniuk who came to Australia as an Ambassadorial Scholar and never left.

Second Week Schedule

G'Day!


We can't believe we are into our second week of our vocational training trip!


We thought we would give you a picture of our busy and very rewarding schedule. This week we are in the lovely Macarthur Area and specifically staying in Campbelltown.





Monday: Gna Ka Lun Adolescent Mental Health Unit at Campbelltown Hospital followed by a tour at the Campbelltown Police Station with Chief Inspector Brian Doyle.





Tuesday: Youth Solutions and Trackside Youth Health Services and in the afternoon a meeting with Professor Gordon Parker of the Black Dog Institute and a team presentation and dinner with the Combined Rotary Clubs of the Macarthur area.




Wednesday: Trip to Canberra and the Canadian Embassy





Thursday: Tour of Odessy House followed by Mayor of Campbelltown hosting a reception for our team.




Friday: Campbelltown Performing Arts High School with a Team

address to the School Welfare Team and executive.








As you can see we are very busy and our free time is spent with our wonderful hosts. The Ingleburn Club has shown us some great Aussie Hospitality and held a bbq for us on Sunday evening at a local club. The combined presentation on Tuesday night will be to a group of 120 rotarians from the neighbouring clubs.

A visit to Prince of Wales Mental Health

Written by Dr. Marshall Korenblum

The office of Dr. Michael Dudley is dominated by stacks of journals, papers and books which seem to be strewn randomly across chairs, desks and the floor. A cleaning lady's nightmare and no picnic if you have obsessive compulsive disorder. He himself is also mildly dishevelled, wearing no jacket, no tie an open shirt and casual pants.

Based on this presentation you might wonder if he could find his own pen. And yet, after meeting with him for 1 1/2 hours on the fifth day of our VTT trip, I was blown away by his warmth, sensitivity, humour and encyclopedic grasp of what causes teenagers to hurt and or kill themselves. He is, after all, the Chairman of "Suicide Prevention Australia", a world-renowned national program which has successfully reduced the suicide rate among young people over the last ten years.

He is also researching the needs of immigrants and refugee teens, especially those who have been traumatized by war in their home countries and he is deeply concerned about indigenous (aboriginal) youth who have been horribly marginalized and even manipulated by organized crime in Australia.

I will definitely return to Canada with greater insight into what works in suicide prevention in young people and hope to maintain contact with him so that we can adapt some of Australia's approaches to this problem to our culture and content.

Lest you think the conversation was all one way, you should know that Dr. Dudley thought Toronto's (Hincks-Dellcrest Centre's) method of teaching psychology, social work and psychiatry students was "cutting edge", "worthy of replication" and he was going to speak to his colleagues about trying to incorporate some of our best practices into their teaching program. (I had informed him of our extensive use of one-way mirrors, "bug in the ear", video-taping therapy sessions for supervision, multi-disciplinary assessment teams and complete integration of service, education and research).

The Oasis

On Wed and Thurs we went to a Salvation Army run shelter/counselling service. The funding is mostly from the Army with fundraising by the program managers. To us, they seem to have many staff from various fields in both mental and medical health. We have also visited several Hospitals and again find they have a lot more staff involved per client. The struggles seem to be similar, overlapping services from youth to adult and collaborating with other services.

oops......busted !!!!

Okay....we weren't going to admit it to the blog but.....on Sunday the team missed our stop on the ferry. We were waiting for them to make an announcement but before we knew it we were pulling away ! Since then our host Fritz has not let us forget our little mistake...

Tonight we were on the ferry on the way to a cocktail party in our honour, when we reached our stop there was an announcement......

"Would the Toronto Rotary Club please leave the ferry and take their belongings" we laughed so hard and immediately turned to Fritz who was having a word with the conductor prior to our trip. Very funny and very embarrassing......

Monday - Giant Steps Facility

The team attended Giant Steps, a school for children with Autism. The school consists of early learning classes thru to grade 12. The classes are small and they use multiple disciplinary teams that use a number of interventions. Their newest program is a college based program. The goal for these students is to be engaged in the community and about the student being healthy.

The picture above is playtime in the yard, Dr. Marshall Korenblum and his friends.

We have arrived.....In Style!

Hello Everyone,

We have arrived safely in Sydney to beautiful weather and amazing hospitality!

We spent the day Sunday aboard a 43 foot game fisher boat exploring the harbour and the numerous bays and actually poked our nose out into the Pacific.

The GSE district coordinator Fiona and her husband Fritz were our hosts.