Good Practice

International GP: Above and beyond

Sue English has been working to help children in East Timor for more than a decade. The first step was a successful lunch program that started in 2002 and saw English and a group of friends raising money in Australia to help provide 1000 East Timorese children with more nutritional food.

‘The lunch program ran for about four years and then José Ramos-Horta became the president of East Timor [in 2007] and he instilled lunch programs into every school … so our program wasn’t needed anymore,’ she told Good Practice.

English felt she could do more in East Timor following the end of the lunch program and found another area in which she could help after visiting a skills-training college for young women in the north-eastern village of Fuiloro. ‘I went and did some work up there and realised what medical problems they had, just simple things like stomach pains, poor posture, tiredness, constipation, and really identified that their diet was not that balanced. They weren’t getting any calcium in their diet, they hardly got any meat,’ she explained.

‘We started sponsoring a food program so they got dairy every day, meat three times a week and eggs once a week. They got protein four times a week.