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A Comparison of Two Communities

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It is generally known that communities differ. Anyone who has traveled outside their hometown has experienced this first hand. No two communities are the same. People differ, environments differ, and thus, places differ. Possibly the most important difference among communities is its support for adequate healthcare and wellbeing. As a nursing student in Community Health Assessment, we were assigned to a refugee family who had traveled from the other side of the world. Fleeing from their country of origin, Myanmar, the family fled to Thailand where they stayed for many years. Following is an assessment of data collected from Thailand and their current home in Antioch, Tennessee. To collect data from our family's current and previous living situations, a team of two other nursing students and I engaged in an abundance of visitation, observation, and research. Each time we visited our family, we observed their habits. We would notice how the mother would get on her hands and knees to clean rice from under the table. We would observe the interactions between the seven children. We would take note of how the mother would look to the father when the family was asked a question by an interpreter. We also observed the family's surroundings as we drove to and from their house of residence. We noticed nearest churches, health care facilities, grocery stores, etc. We observed the lack of sidewalks and access to transportation that the family faced on a daily basis. Finally, we engaged in research as we wanted to find out more about the family's history. We visited World Relief headquarters to look over the family's case file and read the data that had been collected during the family's move from Thailand to America. Finding this information led us on a search to learn more about where they came from. Though the parents originated from the Karen State in Myanmar/Burma, the family as a whole spend most of their lives in Thailand in a refugee camp. Specifically, we gathered maps from Free Map Tools (2013) and Google Maps (2013) to compare the landscape and environment that the family was in between their time in a refugee camp in Thailand and their current housing in Antioch, Tennessee. These maps are found in Appendix A. We engaged in a Windshield

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