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.