One week!

Soo it’s been a week in India ... Marissa, your entry is so organized. My blog / diary / emails tend to be pretty jumbled but here it goes:

I’m slowly adjusting to life in Vellore and I think I should be able to make it. For the first week we took a public health class with the medical students at CMC. Here are a few interesting things I’ve observed:

1. Head Bobble - this amuses and confuses me quite a lot. For the first few days I didn’t even notice it until other people pointed it out to me. Now, most locals seem to do the head wiggle whenever I talk to them. It’s supposed to mean: “yes, maybe or I don’t know” depending on the context. I think that most of the time, they just don’t know what I’m saying :( I wonder if I can work the head wiggle into my communication with the locals especially since I can’t speak Tamil. I think I’m getting better at it.

Here’s a youtube video I found trying to show it:

I should really take more videos myself. On a side note, I have to say that the people here are super nice.

2. Clothing – I totally packed the wrong clothes. I just didn’t know what to do so I just brought random clothes from home. I should have brought more light weight long pants and light colored short sleeves but I don’t really have any of either. It’s really hard to wear long anything when the weather forecast says it’s supposed to feel like it’s over 107 degrees. I don’t know how the people here do it. This is the only place I’ve been to where all females do not wear Western clothes. Most of the women wear gorgeous saris. As I sit in the hot classrooms, I often end up admiring the saris that the female professors wear, wondering how they wrap it around themselves so perfectly and handle themselves so well in the heat with so much fabric. People who can’t handle a sari, like me, wear kalwar sabeez which is a long tunic with gypsy pants. I’ve gotten a few pairs and I’m starting to get used to it but it’s still super hot and I feel super baggy. Students also wear a scarf with this outfit. I didn’t realize that a scarf made a difference especially in this hot weather but it’s supposed to cover up your cleavage even though the tunic is already pretty high cut. I should probably get some scarves

3. Food – This is also interesting. I really like food but recently I’ve gotten into eating health so it’s challenging for me to get used to the food here. Normally, I only eat whole wheat foods with lots of vegetables but now I just eat white carbs and curry. Most people here are vegetarian so I haven’t had much meat in a while. So normally, breakfast is a kind of tortilla w/ curry, lunch is rice w/ curry and dinner may be a masala dosa. We’ve discovered a chicken fried noodle that’s supposed to be an Eastern Asian dish which is pretty good. I’ve also managed to buy boxed milk and I’ve stored it in the dining hall fridge so I can have milk with cereal and banana in the morning. I do love the chai tea here though. They have morning tea around 10:30 am and afternoon tea around 4:00 pm. Chai tea is served in a small espresso sized cup and they make it like this: http://cf1.netmegs.com/memestream/coffee%201.JPG

I’ve also discovered fruit stands outside the campus so I can eat mangoes, pomegranates and oranges. I wish that I could eat more street food though so I can explore more local dishes but I have to be careful or else I might get sick. Today I tried badam milk because the person in front of me got it and that was alright. It’s this almond flavored condensed milk like milk. At least I know what it is. They have these huge jackfruits that they cut up on the side of the street that I’ve been tempted to try.

4. City / Hospital- Ahh Vellore. You are only 2 pages in my 1300 pg Lonely Planet travel guide and you are quite a small town indeed. It’s not that small in terms of size (I’m still not sure how big the city is) but in terms of what is offered. There seem to be more stands rather than stores and most of the city seems to lie around 1 major road. It’s pretty difficult to find specific things although we’ve been lucky enough to find most necessities at the college store. There are definitely no chain establishments. It’s tricky to find a good restaurant but we’ve found a stable at Darling Residence, a hotel that also seems to have the best restaurants in the city. It would be nice to have a good A/C café though where we can just relax and unwind. The hospital is pretty intense. It’s definitely unlike any hospital I’ve ever been to. There are private and general patients. Most patients are general so they can see a resident for 110 rps ($2). If you want to see the doctor, you would have to pay the private patient’s fee = 550 rps. There are sooo many patients and there doesn’t seem to be many doctors. In class, I think we learned that each doctor needs to care for at least 100,000 people based on the India’s population of 1.2 billion. I’m excited to start rotations next week. I’m doing Medicine 1 – Infectious Diseases but I’ll soon also be doing obstetrics, neonatology, ophthalmology, cardiothoracic surgery, urology and doing outreach to the villages.

Last night we sat on the roof with a flashlight / lamp as our “bonfire.” We went around saying our highs and lows for the week. That was cute. At times, life here is challenging but I have to say that our group is pretty awesome. It’s like summer camp except you don’t have to try so hard to make friends and fit in.

I need to take more pictures… hopefully the next entry will include them!

Amy