APR-C-2
TAKEOFF FROM IAD VIA FRA TO DEL ENROUTE TO DHARAMSALA
MANY DROWSY HOURS AND EVEN MORE AIR MILES LATER,
WITH A CHECK-IN OF THE BAGS AND MEDICAL BAGGAGE
APRIL 20—21, 2001
It wasn’t easy--but then, it seldom is! I got to the packing up late last night and put into the suitcase about two-thirds medical stuff and only a bit of my own personal stuff, largely thinking of the hike up the mountain overlooking Dharamsala and the Taj Mahal weekend at the conclusion of this trip. In the middle is two weeks of clinics for Tibetan refugees in the Summer Place of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. I had focused for other reasons on the over-subscribed Ladakh excursion the second two weeks of July, which now has twice the number of people eager to do it as it can accommodate, so that there may be a reason to duplicate that trip, largely because of the July schedule in the summer vacation season. But, I will see Ravi soon enough in India, on the far side of this flight pair through Frankfurt into Delhi to begin the more arduous part by land—bus and train and jeep “Tata”. I got to thinking that this is a long trip I am setting off upon just now---how long became apparent when I realized that I would be making the same trip four times in the next four months to the far side of the world.
There are many small details of each trip that need to be worked out individually, or perhaps with some effort, I can do them all with a wholesale approach, and even before I set out, I was thinking f the way I might approach the Lufthansa baggage attendants at the check in desk. I can now tell you in retrospect, that the strategy worked, but not without the maximum of diplomatic efforts.
I packed all four of the MAP packs into the Bronco and then put all the added medical stuff into the suitcase that I could and packed them all this morning into the Bronco which I left parked in Ross Hall’s parking garage. I then took the shuttle bus to Mount Vernon’s campus, a failing women’s college that GWU took over largely to get its attractive real estate and campus building since the Foggy Bottom campus had once done very well with its real estate ploys but are now hemmed in by activists who do not want any further encroachment by an expansionist university president who is seeking to expand into their historic neighbored. So GW has 34 million dollars of capitol construction on what is now called the Mount Vernon Campus of GWU—and I could see it all on this, my first visit to the Mount Vernon GW campus. It was in the Post auditorium that the Peter Caws birthday festschrift was being held in honor of his 70th birthday. I had told him I would be gone, but thought that as a courtesy to my mentor and chairman of my dissertation committee to whom I should have handed my dissertation outline last week, I should attend the opening ceremonies and initial morning’s discussions. I did. I learned what I already knew and feared: what is considered ground-breaking multidisciplined scholarship is a lot of pedantic cant all repeated with a post-modern reference to a canon of obscure authors who are refereed to in every other breath as an adjectival name-dropping from “in the Lacanian sense” or the Deweyesque” mode or “no one much reads Schutz anymore” or a score of other folk whose originality sensitized of being very active library miners who ha carried a lot of ore out of each other’s books in the terms called scholarship, in “synthesizing a new anitinomial in escaping the hegemonic claims of a post modern perception of the classic hermeneutic epistemology”…. You get the drift.
And here I am, a real world action intellectual, who generates observations of the actual rather than a “strong theoretic based in a body of the literature, grounded in a zeigeist ”…etc. I am re-thinking the advisability of putting together just such an outline as is expected, re-reciting some of the stuff that each of us as graduate students in this allegedly multidisciplinary Human Sciences program are allowed to do. Those who are furthest along or finished have followed the formula, and have applied the rather standardized new mode to feminism, queer studies, post-colonialism, or methodologic inquiry. And it appears that the new director of the program coming next year is Gail Weiss, who gave the most cant-soaked “read paper” of the morning, taking over from my advisor Alf Hiltebeitel, who is a late child of the sixties when the investigations into religion were of the oriental type, so he became a Mahabharata scholar, of the kind who would enjoy the kind of trip I am about to be landing from, except that it would be too real and not theoretic enough. He had his graduate study in the University of Chicago under the Romanian authoritarian Eliade, whom he has not yet forgiven for siding with Richard Nixon from his allegiance to a corrupt autocrat Ceaucescu in Romania from which he fled.
My purpose for being at this meeting, which has another two days to go, was to express my thanks to Peter Caws for his patience in being my committee’s chairman. It is apparent that I also have some friends from deep back in earlier history—such as Jonathon Moreno, now a named professor at the University of Virginia as Director of the Bioethics Center I had once been invited to join back in the era when I was a part of the organ transplant program which had Kennedy Center ethics program funding. Jonathon made reference to me and my interests in his plenary session talk and I would be interested in getting his views—a far more pragmatic and less ideologic approach, when I am working out my thesis. Jonathon is unique since he was Peter Caws’ student and later his colleague. It may be worth a later trip to Charlottesville to get help in organizing the approach to “treating others.”
I left at the lunch break, and came back to GW to write the last of my sign-out emails (Apr-C-3) and let the Dean’s Office secretaries know I was leaving. I went out into the street, and flagged down a taxi, an elderly Lincoln Town Car driven by a still more elderly black woman who had an urticarial rash all over her arms and a severe sniffling probable allergy to spring. She was about to go home, when I suggested I might like a trip top Dulles. She checked her gas gage since this would make her as much money as her long morning already, and said she would. I tried to go around and get the guard’s key to let her into the parking garage under the Ross Hall, but when I turned, she had already driven in when the gates went up for some other reason. We gathered at the Bronco, and I loaded the four MAP boxes into the taxi along with my suitcase, and she started saying that there would be an additional charge for each box. I simply started taking them out of the taxi, when she decided that this was OK after all. We drove through a very heavy traffic pile-up all of them rubber-necking some breakdown along route 64, until we got to Dulles just ahead of what looked like the promised rainstorm of the day.
DISPOSING OF MY “SEA ANCHOR”,
FOUR BOXES OF MAP DONATED DRUGS
FOR DUTY-FREE, EXCESS-LUGGAGE-FEE-FREE TRANSFER
I had to get a bellhop and his trolley to get over to Lufthansa, and we made it to the check in counter where a new trainee was trying to learn how to do everything by the book. Just my luck---I was hoping to find someone experienced enough to bargain with. I was only allowed to check in two of the six pieces I had and would have to await the other passengers whose names I had, but they had never seen me nor I them, so it is unlikely I would be able to find them to have the two of them each check in the two MAP medicine boxes I had forewarned them of by phone. I asked to see the supervisor, and she came and I explained that I would be making multiple humanitarian trips and would run into the same problem with each one of the trips—that is, I would need to check in multiple pieces of luggage without knowing who these people were, and did not want to have to pay large surplus baggage charges for multiple boxes of donated medicine which were going to a charity purpose. The supervisor took my list of names and checked my name and the computer registration of the other passengers to see that they were really booked on this flight, and finally let me check all three extra boxes through to Delhi, so I would not have to pay the extra charges “since you are doing good and charitable work..” This is what I hoped to achieve, not only for this trip but each of the subsequent ones for Ladakh, Spiti Himachal, and Nepal—so, I was careful to take her name and write a letter of thanks, mentioning the same pattern for each of the subsequent trips on Lufthansa, the next one coming up in July for Ladakh.
So, after struggling through taxi and bellhop, and finally the Lufthansa check-in, I have parted company with the excess freight, which I now will have to clear upon landing in Delhi as charitable donated drug and not liable to import duty as salable goods—witness the letter of invitation from the chief of Health and Human Services of Himachal directed to me by fax just yesterday. So, I can now, at least, rest easy since the medicines and I are on the same plane, to be arriving in the same place for the later use of these materials where they will be useful. This dance must be repeated at each of these medical missions, but at least now, as long as the same supervisor is on duty, I may be able to use this precedent for the next travels to India and the next trips.
ENTERING EUROPE AND ANOTHER NEW DAY
IN TRANSIT
I had flown over Gander Newfoundland and then over Dublin, and after the Irish Sea and the tight merry little Isle of England, I am now in Dutch air space, on what has been a stormy flight even at 37,000 feet. They apologize after elaborate excuses for a short inadequate substitute breakfast (read “no coffee” lest it be spilled in the turbulence.)
I will be in Frankfurt for a couple of hours, and will there meet a number of the passengers who will join for the Delhi flight that will be with me for two weeks. I met one, a pediatrician named Carrie at MCV in Richmond who has just joined a practice in Warrenton, Virginia. Her husband is an Alaskan fishing guide, so we could talk about that for a bit and I showed him the Dall Ram picture from last year’s Brooks Range hunt. A young lady named Jenny is supposed to be on this flight also, but I had no way of knowing despite leaving her a message four weeks ago when I talked with her, and now again at the check in to let her know that one of the medicine boxes would be going in under her name into checked luggage. I got a call from one senior medical student from UCLA with whom I had corresponded who will be going on to my alma mater in medicine at the Peter Bent Brigham, so she must be rather good. She had been one of those whom I had talked with and sent email, but she backed out when she was sure she would not have the money. When I returned from Boston and the running of the marathon, there was a call awaiting me on the voice mail asking if it were not too late, she would like to join, since she got the money from a special fund and now she can go—joining in within a week of the departure. I believe this brings us to a total of a dozen, unless any have dropped out. It is not the same as Goa, where everyone dropped out, nor anything like Ladakh, which now has twice as many as can be fitted in signed in already, but this will be unique experience for them in a very unusual setting—with His Holiness himself relaying a blessing upon them. That can’t hurt!
UNENDING RIDES BY TAXI, TRAIN AND TATA JEEP
You have “come a fur piece,” I am, at last, in Dharamsala, as far from home as the Eastern Standard time change would allow to stretch to 9 ½ time zones. I am here in the Hotel Bhagsu, in a village with the hybrid name “Mc Leod Ghanj, Dharamsala,” and I am tired and battered by the long ride and will now be going to bed for real for the first night in several days in transit. But, the last view I had in coming up the road by bouncing Tata was that of Dhauladhar (translated as “White Mountain” at 4,500 meters or 18,500 feet) under “alpenglow” from the sun that had set over the horizon. This amazing Himalayan range was hanging like a mirage before us as we threaded our way over the Sutlej River as we crossed the valleys coming down the foothills on switchbacks. This was the first ever view of the Himalayas on the part of each of the students accompanying me, and they were all excited—having earlier taken pictures of hillsides that were no more than Appalachian height. I had said to them: “Just wait a bit longer and you will see the unmistakable Himalayas, and you will not need my help to recognize that they are different from what you have just seen, or anything that you have seen as mountains before.” I envied them their excitement on looking up at the ”stony clouds” on the horizon as we were driving toward the range.
I am at DHAR = 43* 13.51 N, 76* 19.35 E at 6,600 feet, 108 miles above Chandigarh (CHAN) at 165*, where we began the Tata journey, and 257 miles above Delhi (DELI) at 160* where we started the train trip to Chandigarh. Just for a further reference on the air miles we had put in to get us to India, we are now 7,231 miles from DCAA, which the GPS says can most quickly be reached directly by the Great Circle route by going “over the top” at 337*---a little bit west of due north over the pole. I have unpacked the medical bags, and we have had our opening dinner with all but one of our students (who will be following tomorrow, having been bumped as a “frequent flyer miles” passenger via Amsterdam, and was so discouraged she was about to turn around back to Los Angeles until the call that urged her to come on since we have sent our own Tata and Santush the driver to pick her up at Chandigarh tomorrow.) I will tell you later about our team, and how each came to be joining in this effort—but that will be in the Apr-C-5 chapter which will follow my first (short) night in bed for a while.
Welcome to a new (fourth) chapter in the “Himalayan High” series!