Day 2

So today was my second day in the Darwin office. It was certainly less interactive than yesterday. I spent most of the day working on educational material about domestic violence, sexual abuse and child abuse for when we go to remote communities and I started creating a volunteers handbook.

The sad news today was that one of our clients died. She lived in a remote community. She was young and healthy so they have sent her body up to Darwin to the coroner's office to try and work out the cause of death. Though the social workers reckon it's most likely suicide. We looked up her file so we could close it. She had a good decade-long string of various incidents and abuses. And then we saw her birth date. She was born in 1989. She was only 22.

I suppose that this incident really drove home what I began realising yesterday. That even if I've dealt with domestic violence and intervention orders before, up here, it's a whole new story. Here the injuries are really serious (already I've seen stabs to the head and an entire broken leg). Here, I guess, if we don't get the work done properly people might die.