My SEPerience in Egypt :)

Student Exchange Programme in the University of Alexandria, Egypt was carried out from 12th of July to 21st of August 2018 and is an experience of a lifetime for the participants. They had been granted this golden opportunity to widen their horizon and meet people from different countries. The 40-day trip was a success, fruitful with knowledge, experience and also friends.

All participants from different countries were situated together in the same hostel, which was located at the heart of Alexandria downtown. They shared their culture, traditional foods, games, and their own languages. Everyday, the host university students would bring them to dinner and explore Alexandria just after their classes end. The locals kept asking to take a picture with the participants because Malaysians looked so special to them.

During the programme, they explored both community pharmacy and government hospital pharmacy settings in Egypt. Through community pharmacy training, they learnt about the workflow of the pharmacy, priced some medicine, and collected the medicine according to prescriptions. However, they faced communication problems as some of the locals did not understand English. To overcome this problem, they learnt basic Arabic words and sometimes used Google Translate for ease of communication. During the hospital clinical pharmacy training, the participants had their training at different departments such as intensive care unit, parenteral nutrition unit and urology ward. They were given lectures by the head of department for every unit and given tasks to clerk real cases. They were brought around the wards and had explanations about the hospital settings. The participants learnt a lot of new things throughout the pharmacy training, which allowed them to compare the pharmacy settings there with their own countries.

There was also a mega trip for the participants to travel around wonderful places in Egypt. They went to Safari to witness the sunrise, went snorkeling and discovered the crystal clear Red Sea. They also discovered a huge pyramid and rode on camels. The days where they laid in the middle of the desert, looking at the starry sky with beautiful Milky Way were unforgettable for them. The scenery was amazingly breathtaking. Five of the participants also took the chance to backpack to Luxor. Besides that, there was also an international night where each of them prepared performances that represented their countries, which allowed them to have deeper understanding towards other cultures.

They did face some challenges during their stay in Egypt. For example, the difficulty to communicate with people and also the limited choice of food. One of them had diarrhoea as some of the restaurant might have had bad hygiene. Thus, they tried to get recommendations from their local friends there to determine which restaurants were bang for the buck.

Overall, the programme was really wonderful as the participants learnt a lot of clinical skills, made friends who were teachers, gaining knowledge and positive values from them. “It was the best decision of my life. I'll definitely recommend Student Exchange Programme, especially Egypt,” said one of the participants.

Written by :

Tan Chiaw Wen,

Editorial Unit Pharmaline 2018/2019