APR-C-4
NOT THERE YET…
ARRIVAL IN INDIA—
AND FORWARD PROGRESS
TOWARD DHARAMSALA
April 19, 2002
I am crawling steadily forward, but at least in the right direction. The long and boring pair of eight-hour flights together took 10 ½ hours off my watch and landed me in Delhi at 2:30 AM. Other than an officious fellow at Customs who insisted that I could not take in any medicines as a gift to the people of India for use in medical camp, but that I had to have a licensed physician to approve their use. I had already handed him the gift certificate and the contents of the boxes, but he wanted to open each of the boxes and check them for their contents. By the time he had lectured me again about having to ship them airfreight, and that only a licensed physician could carry them and determine how they should be used, I asked if he had heard what I said. I gave him my card, which matched the name, but he did not look further to go into his preaching about illegal importation, until his supervisor pointed out that he was talking to a licensed physician. So, I thought it best to accept the help I got from the other agents and to leave it at that. We came to an essential understanding at that pint and he taped the boxes back up.
I met Hem Thakkur on emerging from the Customs delay at the airport—I realized why I had been picked off as I saw them signal to anyone else who had official looking boxes. If whatever you were carrying was in a second-use bag or suitcase, you were not stopped, but anything in a new box was presumably new. My stuff looked like it was new and official in the MAP boxes. I was drowsy enough upon emerging into the touts and porters of the Delhi airport, who are all clustering around to grab anything loose and carry it for a “porter’s tip.” I let Hem deal with the rabble that would otherwise try to get in my face, whom I would look through as if transparent and not really there—easier to do if you are sleepwalking.
We checked into the Hotel Ajanta—a small flea trap off a street adjacent to the railway terminal, delivered by a “CNG” (compressed natural gas) taxi, which has not made the air of Delhi cleaner, but has kept the diesel smoke from turning it too thick to breathe for a little bit longer—a rule that had been phased into effect over the period of my recent visits.
I lay down in the hotel at 3:30 and got up at 6:30 for the first of the luxuries I would enjoy—a hot shower. I packed out in the same clothes I had traveled in, since I did not have the baggage brought up; to the room, and we were off to the train station—a platform of the flat-out reclining bodies of the Indian people who are not out hustling you to carry something or render some other services. I am “s a distinction of the "quick and the dead." I am “Englishman” –a term meaning a white person, not specific to gender or color except someone not of the “Wrong Caste” meaning poor. So, I draw a lot of attention, even when in a group that includes dark haired foreign women. I got aboard the train and wrote a couple of postcards, and had the prolonged “nonveg” (read that as = “eggs”) as we rolled through the very parched dry fields as rice is harvested and threshed, and the chaff is blown into choking clouds of dust into the air to obscure the surroundings in a haze of smoke and air contaminants. We arrived at Chandrigarh, and fought through a still thicker group of touts and hustlers to get to two vehicles, one driven by Santosh, and the other a “hire car” with a driver, to stack our medicine boxes and luggage in them. I sat up front with Santosh, as we took off through the heavy clots of pedestrians and sacred cows and traffic hazards in the laneless roads, blaring the horn and jolting around so much that my cervical spine feels like it has enjoyed a chiropractic convention as a volunteer practice patient. I have tried to zone out in the stultifying heat, and just jounce along in the seat belt, which grinds the dust from the open windows into my clothes, which I had stripped down to the short-sleeved shirt and light zip-off pants as we crawled through he Gangetic Plains toward the mountains. We could hardly see them through the haze, even as we drove into them.
We passed through the place where the Sikh Zebu (Brahmin) cattle market is held, and arrived at the place where the “monkey temple” is located by about late afternoon. There, swarms of rhesus monkeys are found all around the temple, begging and stealing from the faithful. I saw several mothers with underslung babies hanging on their hairy fur like two toed sloths in the mossy rainforest. The passing crowd included some Sutras, the holy men practicing their asceticisms, and the occasional very gaily-decorated cow, with orange flags and bangles all over it—a celebration of some festival coming up. There were saffron-robed holy men perched on the roof rack of the diesel belching, embellished blaring horns warning us out of their way. We played “chicken” with vehicles smaller than we, like motorized rickshaws or tricycles, by driving down the right “Wrong” side of the road and they would scurry out of the way, until we would lunge head on into a “Goods Lorrie” and have to scurry back as a the smaller of the two combatants in the feint and fake of the combat traffic.
We stopped once for a very late lunch, which I had encouraged to get us higher than the blistering dry heat of the Gangetic Plains by rising to the pint that at 650 meters up, it was almost comfortable. WE went to a Himachal Tourism Guest House we had been at before in transit up to the “hill stations” the British were fond of using as summer time retreats. On the walls were posters of places of tourist interest throughout the state of Himachal. I realized how much a “regular” I must be by seeing that there was nothing portrayed that I had not been to and at least twice for each. I realized that this group as was the case last year, will be returning to Delhi for a one day trip to Agra at the end of the session, and I will be going with them, when I would rather have gone on to Kathmandu, where my Nepal group will already have been hanging around Kathmandu for several days before my arrival. I learned that this was not the case, now, it having been changed that I will be arriving when they will be on the first through the third of May in Kathmandu.
AFTER A ROAD TRIP THAT IS GRUELING
AND TAKES FOREVER,
WE ARRIVE AT THE HOTEL BAGSU IN MACLEOD GUNJ,
DHARAMSALA, AND MEET THE ADDED PERSONNEL FOR THE MEDICAL CAMPS OF OUR
MISSION
It took until well after dark, going straight up the narrow hill roads, as we crawled past the Dali Lama’s monastery where he has been less frequently in attendance, having been ill lately. We pulled in at the Hotel Bagsu, named for the high waterfall off Mount Triund to which we had climbed last spring—an excursion we will not be repeating this year, although we may take in a day trek at our second venue after the two days we spend in the Sherboling Monastery. I met Ravi here and gathered the gang for s sleepy late dinner. Two new medical students were here already, one a bubbly blonde woman named Lorie, who is in a three week “intensive meditation” course, among the smorgasbord of off the wall things she is into among her “interests” such as alternative medicine, crystals, pyramids, healing, aromatherapy, and the litany of liberal cant. She is going to be, of all things, a surgical resident at University of South Florida, where my friend Jeff Fabry is the program director, saying she had picked this trip since she knew that I was a surgeon and she is a “wannabe” trying to figure out how I do it. She is graduating this year, and is wandering around from the MCP-Hahnemann at Philadelphia where she should have known Madeline Brown, my superb medical student from last year’s Ladakh mission, but she did not.
The other student I am meeting her is Lena, and she is a second year medial student at UMDNJ living in Paramus, who has taken off two years from medical school, for the first of which she got an MPH and the second she has been traveling. She has been off since August, stating in Bali and Indonesia, and then came up to the subcontinent, where she had been in Pokhara, which she crossed the border in a bus from Nepal to get here. She is also interested in seeing how she could do what I do and somehow make a living doing it.
This completes the medical student group with Yoshi (a Tokyo Japanese citizen who is graduating from University of Rochester and going to University of Maryland n medicine/Emergency Medicine) and Kathryn (second year University of Cincinnati) and Marita from GW who asks plaintively at dinner “Am I the only one who does not have a clue about what is happening and knows no medicine at all?” Lena comfortingly responds that she is clueless as well, so I will have to watch these tow most closely. WE will have a high volume at the next two sites, and then find out what can be allowed in independent practice of the others
I learned from Ravi, that, of all things, Signi is finally in medical school, and got accepted at Miami, her first choice. This will require her to work very hard, and I do not believe she is up to that. I reported on Hadley Abernathy’s decision to give up medicine for the PhD in Education at Harvard’ s program for which she just got accepted. I told them of Elizabeth Yellen’ s premier appointment in Boston Children’s, John Sutter’s current status after he and Elizabeth had accompanied me to Malawi, and follow-up on many of the former trekkers with me.
It seems that I will be surrounded by the veterans of the recent past excursions, since Deborah from Denver is going to go to both Spiti and Ladakh, Michael Eiffling is taking his teenage son, and despite his medicine residency at Colorado, is going to accompany me to Spiti and Ladakh and wants to climb Stok Kangri in between my Ladakh and Lingshed excursions. Of all people, Bill Norton, school psychologist (a “doctor” who adds nothing to the medical capability of the trip) will join in the Spiti trip, in which I have at least five GW students participating, with multiple med students from all over, 20+ in Spiti, more than I can possibly supervise once again for the oversubscribed Ladakh, excursion and all but a few spots field for the never-before-done Lingshed trek. DR. Dawa from Lei Ladakh, wants me to give several lectures with slides to the physicians of the area around the Ladakh trip, in which the students will also benefit. It seems the success of these trips is sweeping up not only the students and local physicians, but also inducing Ravi to ant me to proliferate the number I do and the numbers I carry on the excursions. Without careful control, they might evolve into a group disaster with a couple of prima donnas as were seen in the Spiti excursion last year or in the Mark head mutiny in Nepal in 1999. So, it sounds like we have a lot of freshmen, since they are told that this is a chance to be a real doctor even before you learn how to be since there is someone who will supervise you so than you cannot get into real trouble as your are plunging headlong into the unknown. With that encouragement, there are a number of non-medical students who have also wanted to get in on the act, perhaps to enhance their applications, since it seems everyone who has been on my trips who has wanted desperately to become a medical student now is—even Signi. This burden of surveillance is even higher now, and is going to require a close watch so as not to portend disaster.
For now, I have arrived to begin “Dharam-02” to be run into “Nepal-02” before the brief return preceding “Spiti-02” which will have another exciting twenty four hour each way round trip to the far side of the world before picking up a twofer in “Ladakh-02” bumping into “Lingshed-02” The Himalayan blitz has begun!