Into the villages or “If we survive this, it will be the best day of my life”

Today Elena and I joined two nurses and a driver to go into several small villages in the area for home visits. We focused on antenatal/postnatal and well baby checks, any sickness or chronic disease check up in the villages, and taking history of any deaths. The nurses cover about 20,000 patients apiece in the area and visit the villages monthly. It was an amazing experience. We sat on mats with impoverished Indians in their tidy dirt floored, thatched roof homes where they rarely had beds and if they did they stored their kitchen pots under them and cooked next to the fields that doubled as their toilets. These people let us into their homes and gave us respect as doctors. We held their babies and examined their bodies in the rooms where they slept. We took no pictures because some villagers believed that snapping a photo somehow robbed a baby of its soul through its eyes and death would be imminent. They offered us chai tea and coffee from their kitchens. One family of rice farmers made us balls of cornmeal, onions, coconut, and spices. It was probably more then they got to eat for lunch but they would have been offended had we not taken it from them. One man picked coconuts for us and chopped the top off to give us refreshing coconut water. After we finished drinking he sliced them in half and we ate out the delicious gooey coconut center. We are so excited about the coconuts that the nurses asked why. We said they don’t coconut like this in America (these are very different from the typical Hawaiian ones that we think of) and she said, “but how do Americans get their coconut water then?” We laughed and said, “uh they don’t.” She was shocked. We shared lunch with the nurses in a patient’s home. We sat in a sun drenched courtyard and spread out our tins on a mat and sampled leman rice, tomato rice, lemon peppers, okra, chickpeas or chenna and potatoes. It was delicious. Utensils are hardly ever necessary here and Indians effortlessly mix rice and sauce and spice as they shovel their large meals into their mouths. We told Greta, one of the nurses, that in America we often grab a granola bar for lunch or just skip it at work and she responded in surprise and said, “oh so sad!!” One patient we visited lived on the outskirts with a gorgeous mountain in the background. We asked if we could take a picture and she ran inside. We questioned her action to the nurses. They informed us that she was getting ready for our picture. Nearly ten minutes later she emerged with her hair freshly oiled and in her only “good” saree. She acted like it was the highlight of her day or week. We ended the day with tea and snack cakes at a roadside stand and a visit with the camp of Tamil gypsies. They sang Jesus loves me in a combo of Hindi (the language of the north), Tamil (the language of the south), English, and their own dialect as we rocked their babies and played with their children. Throughout the day Elena and I kept saying “where are we?!” The experience was humbling, saddening, and amazing. We are sure to get sick from crazy bacteria that picked up eating out of cups of strangers and their dirt kitchens but even if some vomiting ensues, this day was worth it.