Reflecting on my 6-week remote internship with ThinkPacific, it has been a rewarding and unforgettable experience overall. Throughout these 6 weeks, I have met new Laidlaw Scholars and cheerful hosts from ThinkPacific, as well as learnt more about mental health through the Challenge partnered with the Psychiatric Survivors Association of Fiji (PSA).

Our Challenge was on developing a self-care strategy tool kit specifically for the carers of people with mental illness in Fiji. It was quite challenging for our team, as we came from diverse educational backgrounds, and none specialized in mental health. Also, we were told that this tool kit was a brand new initiative of our partner organization, so we were expected to create the tool kit from scratch; on the other hand, this indicated that we were given the most freedom when designing the tool kit. Since we were no experts, we tried our best by researching available tool kits online, consulting our ThinkPacific hosts and our honourable partner PSA, and even collaborating with local mental health organizations. In the end, we produced a comprehensive self-care tool kit with four components as illustrated below.

The highlight must be when our honourable partner PSA acknowledged our work after our presentation and told us that it would be used in their future workshops; she even mentioned sending us photos of the training workshop when it is successfully held in Fiji! This made me feel relieved and proud of our team - our hard work paid off, and we were a part of this new mental health initiative in Fiji!

Not only has this experience provided me with more mental health knowledge, but also made me realize that everything could be possible as long as you make a starting move. As mentioned, we shared no expertise in mental health, so it made me feel a bit reluctant in working on this Challenge at the beginning - I’m not sure what to do, how to start and where to start, and most importantly, I am not sure if we could really produce a useful tool kit for PSA use at the end. But my heartfelt thanks to my teammates and the ThinkPacific hosts, Naomi and Lavenia, who have provided me with lots of support; my teammates explored a lot of possible ideas with me during Zoom meetings, while Naomi and Lavenia did weekly checkups with us, stimulated us with inspiring questions and relayed our questions to PSA. This motivated me to start researching online, and I realised that there were some tool kits online that we can refer to; from these useful references, we were even able to come up with more ideas to supplement our tool kit. It was still quite surreal to me when I looked back on our end product, and it all started with the first move of research.

Of course, things did not go smooth all the time. Even though our team were all active team players, it was hard to have everyone present in all Zoom meetings owing to our time differences. Therefore, misunderstandings sometimes arose particularly on the outline of the pamphlet. Fortunately, my teammates were willing to speak up and ask whenever confusion arose, so the misunderstandings would be cleared up very quickly. However, this taught me a lesson that I should have taken the initiative to keep everyone posted, in order to make sure everyone was on the same pace. Moreover, intense discussions sometimes broke out when some adopted different perspectives. In the beginning, I was afraid to speak up as I was worried that I might intensify the discussion accidentally; towards the end of this internship, I gradually attempted to speak up, and tried to understand their perspectives and seek a solution that was happy for both. Although I was still a bit hesitant in speaking up, I could see my improvement from no output to more and more verbal output throughout the internship. On top of that, I was more confident in sharing my ideas with my team, receiving feedback and providing feedback to my teammates after this internship.

Overall, it was my pleasure to join this LiA project with ThinkPacific. Special thanks to Naomi and Lavenia from ThinkPacific, the Laidlaw Foundation, HKU and my LiA teammates for making this journey fruitful and rewarding. I wish one day I could visit Fiji in person myself!