Introduction
Kia ora!
My name is Sonja, and I’m excited to be given the opportunity to travel to Chile for one month under the Prime Minister’s Scholarship to Latin America. I am half Thai, half German, grew up living in Thailand, Germany, Japan, and have been in Aotearoa for the past 10 years. I am currently doing a Research Master’s (MSc) in Psychology after graduating in May 2023 with a Bachelor of Science in psychology.
I applied for this programme as the topic, intercultural approaches to health, perfectly fits my future research interests. I hope to do research in the field of intercultural psychogerontology, specifically working with elderly communities from different cultural backgrounds and how experiences of aging and health care can be improved using different cultural and indigenous models of health.
I’m really looking forward to the field visits with the Mapuche and Ayamara indigenous peoples, to learn about their specific indigenous models of health and how these may differ or be similar to Māori and Pasifika models of health. As I volunteer at several addiction NGOs, I also hope to understand how health and drug policies as well as the lasting impacts of colonisation have influenced the lived experiences, practices, and histories of the Mapuche and Aymara indigenous people in Chile.
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PMSLA: A Series of Life-Changing Experiences in Chile
We started off the final week in Chile with a workshop looking at interculturality and creating our own diagrams on what different aspects make up interculturality. It was a good activity to help collate all the skills and topics that we’ve learned throughout the programme. After this workshop, I went on a trip to a…Continue…