One little, two little, three thousand Indians…on a bus

We have started our first assignment at CHAD, Community Health Against Disease, a community hospital outside of town. We definitely got the run around trying to get our paperwork filled out and probably walked 10K in the process, but the experience was worth it. Liz and I spent the first day on the pediatric ward. Elena hit the nursery and Carly went to the ICU isolation ward. We rounded on the kiddos who had from run of the mill diarrhea to protein energy malnutrition infections and gruesome burns. The wards were very clean but simple mattresses with no sheets and there were 8 beds to a room. The moms often slept on the cement floor next to their kids, but they were ever present. We also saw kids in the nursery, mostly with jaundice and sky high bilirubin levels. Then we spent a day in clinic as well seeing all kinds of illnesses. Some much is exactly the same as it is at home, but poor management of chronic illnesses here causes DM and HTN to be much worse. Then there is the crazy stuff like typhoid and leprosy and goiters. It’s a very interesting experience and I am pretty sure that no one around here takes the HIPPA quiz online because several people crowd around the docs in clinic waiting for their turns as the docs go over patient charts. The greatest feat of the first two days was mastering the public bus system. I am pretty sure that all 200,000 Vellore residents are on the streets hailing buses at all times. The bus is almost always standing room only and people crowd and push to the point that every surface of your skin is plastered against a sweating stranger. And due to this you can’t see out the windows, so it was not surprising when we missed our stop and took the bus a good 30 minutes out of our way before we became suspicious. We have figured out peak bus times now and the various routes we need, so for anyway from 1-3 rupees we have the run of the town, and sometimes we even have a seat!