JUN-B-15
THE FULL DAY IN MANALI,
WHEN I CAN MAKE THE ROUNDS OF THE USUSAL PLACES
AND MEET SOME INTERESTING PEOPLE
June 24, 2002
No, I did not intend to bedevil you with a rash of hieroglyphs and a dot between each word with a mark at each paragraph. I had typed everything very normally, but then asked to have a single addendum note attached on the data from one patient we were hoping to refer to the University of Colorado and I had typed and saved, I thought, a neat letter to Alden Harken with the introduction of the patient and the circumstances. But when Michael Eiffling did something to the typed addendum, brief as it was, these code marks entered not just the letters from which I could not purge them, but I then found that ALL of my text in all of its forms had been polluted by these text marks which renders it all but unreadable. It may b e hard enough to read the text of these adventures, but now an automated feature I cannot correct has added another further impediment.
There was not a lot of action today in Manali for several reasons. First, when we went to Lady Willingdon Hospital to get the refraction and glasses made for Michael Eiffling, we found out that both the wonderful young lady who does the eyeglasses as well as Laji Varghese are out until July 3 at a medical camp of their own in the new three valley medical outpost they had set up. I went to see Dr. Sheila Varghese in her very crowded clinic and introduced her to Michael and suggested he may return to volunteer. I found out this way that the schedule of my being here repeatedly in India which I had requested from Ravi to send to him was never forwarded, no doubt due to his prejudice about mission hospitals. We are able, it seems, to deal with any religion, including about as intense a level of religious life and ceremony as that which occurs anywhere on earth in the Spiti Valley, except Christianity, which we must stay away from because of something that has happened in Ravi’s interaction through marrying a Catholic. If he wishes to have no part of Christianity, that would sever the link I had made with MAP and the source of 100% of the medicines I have been packing in on each of these missions and distributing—and not in the name of Sikh Hinduism!
We went to the DMAS (“Directorate of Mountaineering and Allied Sports”) to set up Michael and his son with some treks to do during the interval between Spiti and Ladakh, which he is also going to follow with me. When we got there, Bill Norton, enthroned in the front seat of the jeep, said,” I have never seen this place so busy!” That is no doubt a true statement. Just as it was when the freshman medical student Austin was shown a child with an erysipelas rash and he responded on the first day he had ever seen patients, ”Well, I have never seen this before!” Probably in both cases this would fall short of culpable ignorance, but in Bill’s case it was to let the students know he had been here briefly on one visit when I was also, and had therefore got the chance to “orient them” to the institute. It is no doubt because he looks like a climber---a Pickwickian morbidly obese fellow who has to take an authoritative stance on all things related to whatever his friend Ravi has ever been involved in and give instructions on the places he has never been, on issues he knows nothing about, in order to enhance his position as the senior statesman “Leader of this fine group of people.” It is laughable if it were not for the fact that it confuses people into thinking he really does have something to say, other than “Look at me; I am here; and I am now part of something good for the first time, and am more than willing to be the spokesperson to take full credit for this enterprise—whatever it is!”
I found an Internet café and sent home the disc—but could do so only as an attachment. The items I had worked on last night as cover letters could not be opened since there was no word processor on the machine I had used and I could not “cut and paste.” And, now, this! How to clear this machine of this abomination of some stigma of auto format is as yet a mystery.
I had lunch with the Eifflings, and am now ready to go out for the Italian dinner or pizza and beer that is the climactic farewell celebration—the kind of ceremony that Bill Norton revels in and he will take the full opportunity to thank each participant for the wonderful job in the medical camps which he personally supervised. Then, it will be on to the Dharamsala stop, another long drive for an unnecessary stop--after all, I have not been there for a couple of weeks! But this will allow the students the chance “for Bill to introduce them to the Dali Lama”---meaning they can go home saying that they were in the same town as he lives in when he is there, and not too ill for public appearances.
I have still more endurance of pompous officiousness to put up with on this trip which has been overloaded with it.