First day in India

I am sitting at a small desk in our bare three-room apartment in the Staff Quarters building on the campus of the MediCity Institute of Medical Sciences rural medical school. We are just outside the small village of Ghanpur, about 50 km northeast of Hyderabad, India, which is about a 2 hour drive on crowded streets and bumpy dirt roads. I’m writing on SB’s computer, hoping to post this blog when I get the chance. We don’t have a phone here, but there is internet in the Hospital’s library, which will be open on Monday.

After more than 24 hours of travel from Berlin (via London and Mumbai), we arrived at the Hyderabad airport in north-central India. As instructed by the man helping to organize our trip, we took the AeroExpress bus from the airport to Keyes High School in the neighboring city of Secunderbad. The ride was probably one of the best introductions to India we could have had.

With the horn honking every time our bus made a turn or passed another rickshaw or car (pretty much once a second), we drove for the next 80 minutes through the small streets of Hyderabad and Secunderbad. At first, we mostly passed old one-story shacks and buildings, nearly each one open like a garage (with a similar garage like door), selling goods at the edge of the street. Inside, sat old men smoking pipes, children playing games, women cleaning pots. One building after another, nearly all attached, in a long unending line, we likely passed hundreds of these. Later, as we descended lower into the city and the buildings got larger, we passed half-fallen buildings, with rubble left where it lay, where the rooms that remained standing had been converted into store fronts as well. Some of the buildings just had the front wall missing, possibly after an old earthquake, some of them three stories tall, with all rooms exposed to the street. We passed tent cities and shack towns, but mostly every single space we saw was occupied by storefronts selling goods or carts selling bananas and mangos.

There were, as one hears about India, people everywhere. The cities of Hyderabad and Secunderbad have large populations of Muslims, as well as Hindus, and in our journey, we went through sections that seemed predominated by one group or the other, but usually the people were quite mixed. In the higher regions of the city at the beginning of our ride, most of the women wore black burkas, covering everything but their beautifully painted eyes (I did see quite a few of them on remarkably high and fancy high heels, however). The men mostly wore muslim caps and sarong like white fabric around their waist, though there was a lot more diversity in their dress. Lower down in the city we passed women in an beautifully colored saris (not one seemed the same), and men in western clothes.

It is impossible to describe the sites that we saw: throngs of people, in a burst of colorful clothing on every edge of the street; food booths with heaping noodle dishes and curries; naked children with swollen bellies running among the tent cities; rickshaws overflowing with people racing three or four to a lane; hundreds or thousands of motorcycles, usually with several passengers on them (the women always gracefully sitting sideways and somehow not falling off); fires on the side of the street; hundreds of mango stands; and the thick smoggy and smoky air that made our eyes burn.

We arrived at Keyes High School right at the end of dusk. It was really a large bus stop in the middle of a very busy four-lane road, and nothing nearby resembling a high school. There were crowds of people everywhere, speeding/honking rush hour traffic, bustling storefronts in all directions, and again, that thick dust and smoke that made the whole seen a bit surreal. As we climbed down the bus stairs, we were greeted by taxi drivers who were all anxiously calling out to us to offer a ride. Among the crowd, I spotted a man who was mouthing to us: “Mediciti?”, and --just slightly relieved-- I said yes. He informed us that the rest of our journey – another hour – would be in the back of the hospital van. This was good to hear, as I was really not ready to stop seeing the sites. As we sped across the busy narrow roads, hoking until our horn stopped working, I realized that during our entire journey we had not passed a stop sign or streetlight. Throngs of rickshaws, bicycles, walking pedestrians, motorcycles and the occasional car filled every street, and at each intersection, with a whole lot of hoking, somehow everyone made it across. Harder yet, was being a single car trying to make a right turn through traffic (people drive on the left side of the road here, as in England) or cross traffic on foot as we did when we stopped to buy food and water at a small grocery store. But somehow it seemed to work.

We made it to our dormitory about 3 hours after leaving the airport and got a quick tour of the surrounding facilities before our driver had to leave to head back home. Situated in the dusty, high-dessert like town of Ghanpur, which appears to be on some sort of large mountain (we have no idea where we are!), the Mediciti hospital, medical school and dormitories stand in a complex along a dirt road. The hospital and medical school building are all half-open, with outside halls and rooms closed by padlocks. Everything is bare here, as one would expect: empty rooms with cement tile floors and little furniture, an empty elevator shaft, dirt paths and dirt roads.

Everywhere around us is high desert, with occasional cattle grazing on the nearby shrubs and wild dogs resting under trees. Our apartment is on the third floor, has a balcony, which I excitedly sit on for a few minutes until I remember that it’s a freaking 110 degrees or so (40-45C said our host). We have fans in every room and the hosts have graciously somehow got their hands on air coolers (something like a step below an AC) for us, which we use at night to cool off the rooms for sleep. The shower only has cold water, which in this weather is a wonderful relief.

Today is a holiday for everyone (we don’t know what kind, but it is Sunday) and we have just found out that from May 1-30, all the medical students go home for vacation, so it will just be us and the real doctors who work at the hospital (“you are doctors, aren’t you?” asked our host soon after picking us up.) There is no functioning phone anywhere in the building (there is possibly one at the guard house), but there does seem to be wiring for cable internet to all the apartments in our building (however, not to ours.) I called my parents on SB’s cell phone (which seems to work everywhere!) last night so that they wouldn’t have a heart attack, but other than that, I have no idea when we will be able communicate again or when I will be able to publish this blog.

Given that we are in the middle of nowhere, and our hosts have gone home to their families, we are taking the day to rest and catch up on sleep (and blogging). Every few hours we walk out of the living complex, past the smiling, sometimes puzzled guards, to the nearby hospital canteen (past the smiling/puzzled guards who guard the hospital) for our meals. We’re not sure what we can safely eat or not, so we’re sticking to rice and spicy cooked vegetarian foods for all meals, which is fortunately all they serve.

Nearly everyone we interact with – so far only guards and kitchen cooks—speaks very limited English or none at all. Our Hindi –I studied it on a video game on the plane while flying to India (I love Jet Air), but my remote broke after about 20 minutes—consists only of the numbers 1-7, which I plan to put to great use. Hand/head communication is also limited given that shaking your head ‘no’ can mean either yes or no. As we walk to and from the canteen, young women in beautiful saris and young men in western clothes, walk past us smiling, giggling and pointing, and we try to smile back, without looking too enthusiastic about our own presence.

Tomorrow, we will meet with our hosts in the morning to plan the rest of our stay and rotations. Our only anxiety at this point is that they will actually expect us to be real doctors.