It is an exciting and self developing experience which will challenge your perspectives and teach you many things.

Life will have its rewards and frustrations and it can be demanding. It will challenge and stretch you as never before. The people who get the most out of their postings are flexible, adaptable, resourceful, resilient and are able to meet the demand ans cope professionally and personally with the experience.

Professionally, you will be a guest of the local community and will need to respect and accommodate the local culture. This will mean wearing appropriate dress and observing cultural norms. The ability to empathise with local people and share in their day-to-day worries and feelings is essential, in order to be accepted by the community. This requires finely development perceptions and sensitivity. You will certainly find that problems arise and you must have the persistence and resilience of character necessary to deal with them.

You will need to be prepared to unlearn much of what has been taught in your training, which may be mainly hospital-based and disease-orientated. You must be open-minded enough to look beyond the obvious and perceive the real causes of poverty and the way society is ordered. You will be working as part of a local team with people whose skills may be different from your own; you will have the opportunity to share your skills and also learn new ones from others. You will also represent Action Health at organisational and governmental levels and will need to be able to work well with local officials and people at all levels.

It is essential that you remember that your period of work will form only part of a long-term programme. You must recognise that the fruits of Action Health's partnerships develop gradually over the time frame of the whole programme. Trying to push the pace of progress to fit in with your won sense of achievement may not be sustainable in the long term.

"I found a community struggling to achieve basic health care, and learnt that if I worked with an open mind I was able to apply my knowledge to different circumstances and offer the team skills it will be able to use long into the future." Lisa Watson, Physiotherapist, Karnataka, India

Personally, you need to be aware of the culture shock you may face when you get there and will need to be able to adjust to a very different environment. Projects can be located in rural areas, small towns or deprived urban neighbourhoods and may be isolated. Quite often the pace of life is slow and you will need to be open to the fact that your priorities may not be the same as those of others.

You will be working with fewer and different resources than you are used to, and will also have to acclimatise to the obvious inconveniences of heat, dust, mosquitoes, lack of water, electricity and transport. There may be a lack of privacy and recreational facilities when you are not working, so you will need to go prepared with some ideas on how to cope with this. The excitement and challenge of being in a different country may soon wear off. Working overseas is not for those who are 'running away' from problems, personal or otherwise. It is a positive act and you must want to do it.

"We spent time looking at the importance of play as a way of encouraging communication skills. It was amazing what the trainees came up with from things that they found lying around - wood, clay, bamboo. By using locally available resources, we aimed to encourage families to make their own toys to help their disabled children develop." Ruth Duncan, Speech and Language Therapist, Raichure District, India.

Despite the differences, and because of them, working with Action Health is the opportunity of a lifetime and an experience you will never forget.

However, it is very important that you have a realistic picture of the work with Action Health and that you think about how you would cope with these issues before you decide to apply. This will ensure that you maximise you effectiveness as a trainer and your enjoyment of your posting.