week of posts continued

01/05/08 I went to the village and did a little work there. It was interesting to see the type of people who came to the clinic. There were poor village people as well as wealthy ones. There is little proper care available, so everyone will come. We worked out of the Sri Chaitanya Saraswat eye clinic and saw loads of people. Some saw the doctor and some just saw me. The other girls that are here are from all over the world. There is one from Serbia, one from Venezuela and one from Italy so I am the only one who can speak “good” English, enough to understand the translator and then tell the girls what he is saying. It is hard when there are so many people who have English as a second language. It can be hard for them to communicate with each other in broken English. Many people here speak some English so I have been able to do a lot of work on my own. One 20 year old came in with a sore ear so I gave him ear drops another lady came in with muscle pain and when I asked if she was taking any medication currently she pulled out a bottle of HCTZ she was taking for her “high BP”. I asked if she had any other pills (potassium) and she said no so we gave her potassium. We don’t have to facility for testing of levels (K+ etc) or culturing bacteria etc, so we are completely treating symptoms. If they have what seems to be an upper respiratory tract infection we are giving amoxicillin which is readily available and inexpensive.


I am staying in an amazing house next to a pond which has a temple in the middle of it. It is called Jal Mandir or water temple.I have a room to myself. There is water, but not hot so to take a warm bath I have to heat my water using a coil immersion heater. All the windows have metal bars on them to protect from monkeys! The monkeys here are really big and can steal things.