One of these things is not like the others..

At times, it's been a little awkward for us here in India, partly because we aren't sure how to identify ourselves. People ask (in possibly the only English words they know): "You, Indian?"

I'd like to tell them. Well, yes and no. Our parents are Gujarati, but we identify ourselves as Americans. USA is home. But we can speak Gujarati, and I can understand and speak a little Hindi. But we don't know Oriya (the local language). We are familiar with some Indian customs, the religious beliefs our parents taught us, and general Indian thoughts on certain issues. We had an Indian wedding, too. Yes, I know what Holi is and who Shahrukh Khan is. But no, I don't eat rice and dal with my hands. Yes, we are married. But no, I don't wear sindoor or a mangal sutra.

I guess I didn't realize how nuanced our answer would be to a simple question like that. But the more I think about it, the more I realize how confusing it all is. I think it's helped me sympathize with people who seem to have no idea what to say to us. I've broken the ice with many of the people who speak Hindi, but the others are much harder to befriend. Still, we have made some friends with the hospital staff, and one of the paramedics ("sisters" as they call them here) has even decided to call Nilit "Jijaji" (an affectionate term for brother-in-law). I found out that the more I talk, the more comfortable they become.

All this has also made me realize how people (myself included) like to place people into a nice little bucket when they first meet them. Maybe it's curiosity and trying to fill in as many blanks as you can when you first meet someone. Maybe it's a way for our brain to figure out, as soon as possible, whether we should trust this person. I'm not sure. But whatever it is, it comes with making quick judgements and generalizations without really knowing very much. The generalizations are not always wrong, but they're not always right either. Yes, I'm American, but no I don't like football or hamburgers. Yes I'm a woman, but I don't really like shopping or makeup. None of these things are bad, they're just not me.

Anyway, its made me think about putting a stronger effort from now on to try not to do this to people I meet. Embrace the curiosity differently and just ask about who they really are. I bet they'd love to tell you.

It's also made me examine my own identity a bit. Sometimes I'm embarrassed about not knowing a certain Indian custom or religious occasion, or even just the appropriate mannerism for the moment. But then I realize, it's okay. I'm American. I was born in LA. I say "dude." Yet, I am proud of my Indian heritage too, and I carry that with me too. I bet sometimes I'm more Indian than American, even. Just how sometimes I'm a tomboy in a sportsbra, and sometimes I like dangly earrings and heels. Sometimes I geek out on engineering problems, and sometimes I zone out in front of the TV. No buckets. Just me being me, and people being themselves.

Anyway, just some thoughts to chew on... Til next time!

Life in Orissa.

We've been in Orissa now for over 2 weeks! It's actually a little hard to believe. Let me tell you a little about what it's been like on a daily basis.

As Nilit posted about before, we live in the hospital, just a floor above the entrance and patient care center. We have settled into somewhat of a daily routine by now. We wake up around 7-7:30, and then we get ready and head downstairs to the basement canteen for breakfast.

The cook, Yogi, sees us and says hi. He quickly goes into the kitchen to get us our special plates of food. I am not completely sure how they are different from everyone else's food, but we seem to get a little more variety. Everyone else mostly just gets a (gigantic) portion of rice and dal (a lentil soup) on top. We get spoons, too, whereas everyone else only east with their hands. We also suspect they take special care to ensure our food is hygienic. They've had plenty of volunteers here and they get that we can't drink the local water. The cooked food like the rice and dal is generally the same, but some other things are not. We don't get fresh or raw unpeeled anything, and we don't get eggs now that I've told them I don't eat them.

  

Yogi cuts his veggies using this neat little blade.

More kitchen staff! We don't have all the names yet..

So anyway, Yogi is great. He mostly speaks Oriya, and him and I have definitely spoken Hindi, but he really likes trying to speak to us in English. Always smiling, he asks “Food, okay?” and “Is want more?” to make sure we like it and to see if we want seconds. Once he found out that we were Gujarati, he started making us roti (a tortilla-type bread they eat more in Gujarat than they do around here). On one particularly entertaining evening, he kept telling us we were both “very, very good! Nilit and Shreya...very much like!” So we get along with him pretty well :)

Breakfast is usually upama, which is semolina mixed with some veggies, peanuts, and spices. It's usually served with dal, and a couple small bananas. Nilit takes my peanuts and I take his bananas. Fair tradesies.

After breakfast we usually head upstairs, a floor above our room floor, to a conference room where we can get (spotty) wifi and get some work done. When we first got here we spoke to the hospital manager and director about the needs of the hospital, and how we may be able to help with the skills that we have. We've started a few projects that we are hoping to finish before we leave at the end of the month.

Our biggest project is putting together a low-cost handheld fundus camera for retinal imaging of the eye. You have probably seen it at your eye doctor's – the image comes out as a red circle showing the back part of your eyeball. The hospital here has opened two new clinics and the cost of a typical tabletop camera is prohibitive. Nilit and I found a few designs that others have created, and we are putting our efforts toward constructing one ourselves. We are guaranteed to come across some hurdles with finding parts and figuring out how to actually physically put it together (really wish we could combine Maya Pedal tools/resources with this project!). But, we will try our best to figure it out with what we have and the time we have. Stay tuned on that.

When we aren't doing that or a few other small projects, we like to go downstairs to the patient care area and shadow the doctors. It's fun to watch them check acuity and how they interact with patients. On slow days it's nice to just get to know the doctors and “sisters” a little better. “Sisters” what they call the women medical technicians and nurses who do the lion's share of the work here. The single ones also live in a single small room up on the top floor of the hospital.

We usually head back to the canteen around 2pm for lunch, and then re-start work again. Half of the time we have been here, there have also been surgeries in the afternoon which one of us must shadow. Most surgeries are for cataract patients who cannot afford their own way. The patients come from outreach camps that the hospital organizes in rural areas of Orissa, and Unite for Sight (the organization we are volunteering under) provides these surgeries free-of-charge for these patients based on the donations that we receive as volunteers. (So for all of you who were gracious with your donations - This is your money, hard at work and reaching people who really need it!) As Unite for Sight representatives in the hospital, we have to watch the surgeries and sign when each one is complete.

Watching the surgeon perform cataract surgery is amazing. They set up two tables of patients and while the nurses are prepping one person, the surgeon is replacing the cataract lens in the other. The surgeon spends, on average, 5 minutes to extract the cataract lens and replace it with a new one. I have timed at least a few to be less than 3 and a half minutes. To me, it's not only amazing that the surgeon can perform so quickly, but also that someone's life can be changed so drastically by a 4-minute $50 surgery.

Photo credit: Kate (previous volunteer)

Cataract patients receive for free their hospital stay, post-op meds, food, and of course, the surgery itself (Photo credit: Kate, previous volunteer).

Anyway, after that, as long as surgeries are all done for the day we stop working around 5-5:30. At that point I like going up to the top floor and soak in the sunset. The hospital is in Dhenkanal, a small town about two hours away from the Orissa's state capital. The hospital is on a smaller road which is about a 15-minute walk away from the market. It is situated in front of a big plain of farm land, and next to a hill where there's a small police station. From the top floor you can also see the neighbor's houses, which are built with wood and thatch roofs. Sometimes I'll run into one of the sisters up on the top floor and we will chat and hang out. Nilit and I then like spending the latter part of the evening reading or writing, or seeing what's on TV (we have a TV in our room!). Around 8pm, we head back down to the canteen for dinner.

View from the front of the hospital. Hogs!

Sunset..

The neighbors.

Lunch and dinners consist usually of roti, rice, dal, and a few Indian vegetable dishes. Since we have been here, we haven't had one day without okra (“bhindi” in Hindi and Oriya) – at least either for lunch or dinner. Once my favorite dish, bhindi starting to get a tad old. But it's food, and it's good, so I'm not complaining! A couple of times Yogi has made sort of a stir-fry noodle dish for us with cabbage. It is surprisingly good, and oftentimes a refreshing change.

After dinner sometimes we will go back up to the roof for some fresh air and chit chat with the sisters. Otherwise, we just head back to our room and relax.

Hanging out with the sisters - Showing off some pictures of family and friends.

So that's about it. Lather, rinse and repeat for the next day! It's been a bit hard because we realized we hadn't been out at all the first few days we got here. We are, once again, in the position of living where we are working, and we forget to make an effort to leave the hospital. So we started taking some breaks and going for walks along the main road to the market. If we go, we try and go after breakfast to avoid the mid-afternoon heat. We usually come back with some ThumsUp (the local Coca-Cola product) and snacks. I talk to the sisters about coming with us, but none of them like the crowd or busyness of the market.

As far as comfort level goes, it's been pretty darn hot here. I've completely forgotten that it's still winter back home, and it's actually hard to imagine being cold and wearing a coat right now. We opted out of having A/C in our room since it's pretty shady in there and we are only there at night. We figured it would be fine. I wonder if we will regret that as March warms up, but we will find out soon enough!

Well, that's all for now. Thanks for reading! Soak up some of that winter for us back home. We won't be back in time to enjoy it this year.

One Week in India

It has been kind of a whirlwind the last week, and even though it hasn't been too busy here in India, I'm still struggling to get a post about some of the experiences we've had. Today at lunch Shreya and I were talking about how much we haven't posted about our stay in Guatemala. We've planned a few "Throwback" posts to cover some of the things we saw in Gaute. I still have a draft post titled Guat Cars? (What Cars) that I need to organize pictures for. I'll get around to it, soon hopefully.

The week in India so far has been pretty good. The flight and time changes have messed up my sense of days of the week and it is hard to tell if today is Friday or Wednesday. I do know that 9 days have passed since we arrived in Dhenkenal (it is easy when you arrive on the 1st of the month). We flew through Mumbai and I was expecting a lot of hassle with customs and immigration but was met with (almost) no resistance. The customs officer did ask us to open one of our boxes of donated eye glasses, but after review of the appropriate documentation and confirmation with a senior officer, he let us pass. We patched up the box and headed to the domestic terminal. All of our bags made it and were relatively intact when we arrived in Bhubaneswar. The previously mentioned box was hanging on with a couple of holes in it and patched with security and Lufthansa tape. After collecting our bags we found the director for the Kalinga Eye Hospital waiting for us at the exit of the airport. With a hearty greeting and packing of our luggage into the car we headed off to Dhenkenal. The drive was typical India with the usual auto-rickshaws, scooters, honking cars, trucks, and of course cows for the almost 2 hour drive. Once we arrived at the Kalinga Eye Hospital they gave us a nice spacious room and we set up camp:

Home for the month of March

As you can see above we moved two single beds together and hung a mosquito net to cover them both. While we were in the U.S. we saw pictures of the living arrangements and thought about how we'd be able to hang a mosquito net. We found some plastic hooks at Home Depot that have a sticky back to them and brought them with us. We placed the hooks on opposite walls and then hung some paracord between them. The paracord goes through a ring at the top of the mosquito net. So far it has worked pretty nicely and we hope it doesn't fall on top us in the middle of the night.

We were extremely tired but determined to stay up until at least sundown on the first day. We figured this would be the best way to beat the 12.5 hour time difference that our bodies were feeling. We were told to relax and that around 4pm we would have our first chance to watch a cataract lens replacement surgery. We were so excited we decided to take a 20 minute "power nap". Four hours later we heard some knocking on our door and in a sleep induced haze I answered the door and found out one of us needed to stumble head to the Operating Theatre (OT). Luckily, all that was required was observing the surgeries and writing down patient data. After the OT, I headed back to the room and Shreya and I took another "power nap" and were woken up for dinner around 8:30p. Needless to say, we were way more tired then we thought. Despite all of the napping, we slept through out the night.

The next day we sat down with the director and figured out some projects to work on. We're only here for 4 weeks and we have a good sized list to work on. We weren't expecting to do much engineering work here, but after communicating with the director and hospital manager we came up with some fun projects that will allow us to flex some of our engineering skills. Some of the projects are outside of immediate knowledge base and we'll need to contact some experts in the field we know back home (thanks you guys!). It's going to be fun and interesting for sure!

So after 10 days in India, we're still adjusting. The transition has been a big change from where we were. Being out of the U.S. for entirety of this year may finally be catching up to us. We are reminscining more and more about friends, family, and the familiarity of home. The people we've met here so far have been interesting and we've had some issues remembering all of the names. We have picked up two pets though:

FReddy peaking out of the A/C.

His friend hanging around.

We named one Eddie (or as I like to call him FReddy, for Fast Reptilian Eddie or Fat Reptilian Eddie depending on the day) and we're still trying to come up with a name for the second one. Any suggestions are appreciated. They have been scampering through our room and have startled us a couple of times. They seem to be well fed, and as long as they are eating all the bugs from our room we are not complaining. We can tell them apart from the others around the hospital as they are slightly darker in color. The white painted walls make the others an interesting pale color. 

Thums Up!

We have ventured into the village a few times and have comeback with Thums Ups (picture to the left) and wafers (chips). All in all, we're trying to keep ourselves busy and things are going well. Until next time!

Goodbye Guatemala...Hello India!

I'm writing this on the plane to India, but I probably won't have a chance to post it until we reach there and settle in..

Leaving Guatemala has me thrown off. I am a mixed bag of emotions. I really think we had embraced the notion that we were living there, not just passing as visitors. We knew the guy in the market who sold good bananas for cheap - he was in the corner by the church. We figured out the seemingly obscure hours of the lavanderia and panaderia. We knew which tortilleria we favored, and where the bank and post office were. The neighborhood dogs seemed to know us. We felt a little like Guatemalans, I think. It's hard to just turn away from that.

Leaving Maya Pedal itself felt a little like leaving home, which was unexpected too. When we were there we were nearly always in good company with the people who work at the shop, friends and family of the shop who stopped by often or came to play soccer with us in the evenings, and of course our fellow volunteers. Saying goodbye to the Maya Pedal staff was particularly sad because we are certain we won't return to Guatemala any time soon, and even if we did, we no longer expect that Maya Pedal as an organization will be alive (I may write more about this later).

So we said a sad goodbye to the physical space of Maya Pedal, too. It has a long history and has housed volunteers like us for at least 15 years. There are little paintings on the walls, a hand-written volunteer manual, a guestbook with fun and weird and inspiring writings. A bookshelf full of books left by others. The reason it felt a little homely was a result of years of others who had come before us and made it that way. I'll miss all that.

We also had made friends with the volunteers at Bici-Tec which is the organization that separated from Maya Pedal a few months back, but remains in Itzapa. Saying goodbye to all of our fellow volunteers was sad, 
but somehow we were all certain that our paths would cross again one day. Things tend to work out that way. I realized soon that people at Maya Pedal who had only known for short time we got to know fairly quickly - I suppose that happens when you're always within earshot of each other and share all your meals and the small confinement of a bathroom, workshop, and kitchen. :)

I was split, too, about the one night layover in LA en route to India. The reality is, I miss home. I look at my passport sometimes and get weirdly patriotic, I miss our friends and family, and sometimes I remember the comforts of home like our own bed, walking around barefoot on our carpet and drinking water (and brushing teeth!) from the tap. I was split on whether having one night of some of these comforts and being able to see a good friend (Hi Lena!) would make me long to be back home (an emotion I dread right now for more than one reason), or actually recharge my batteries and get me excited for India. I don't actually have a clue what it turned out to be. Maybe that will be clearer later, maybe not.

By the way, I'm writing all this in quite a fog. I really don't know how many time zones we've crossed or what time or date it is anywhere. I do know that we took the flight from Guate City to LA, then LA to Frankfurt, now Frankfurt to Bombay, and eventually Bombay to Bhubaneswar. Our last guess was 30 hours of travel time so far. My watch is still on Guatemala time but I couldn't tell you if it's AM or PM there.

Anyway, despite being a little emotional about leaving Guatemala, I really am excited about India. Let's see what the next chapter of our little adventure brings.

That's all for now. I'm just looking forward to reaching our destination and having some sort of vertical surface to sleep on.


More on India later! Adios!