What do you mean 'no water?'
Trip Start
May 05, 2004
1
10
14
Trip End
Jun 30, 2004
Chennai (Madras),
India
Friday, May 21, 2004
pretty busy, and the internet has been down, so I haven't been able to
update as much as I'd like. But I'm here now, as we're all good. Tuesday
in ultrasound got to be a little boring, but it was still fun when we
were doing stuff. The day before I wore this great strand of Jasmine
flowers in my hair, and I didn't have time to get any that morning, so
everyone was asking me where my flowers were. I think they like seeing
us making an effort to get into the culture. Wednesday and
Thursday I was in orthopedics, and it was interesting. It was all small
animal. We had quite a few large breed dogs (especially great danes) in
with bowed legs and bony projections on their front legs. These are
nutritional problems, as they aren't getting the correct calcium to
phoshporus ratio. The treatment is to tell the owner to stop the
"homemade diet" and put them on commercial food. My guess is that the
dog just gets scraps or garbage, and that is the polite way to say,
"start buying the dog food!" I had my first interesting run-in with the
mean bangaladeshi students. These guys on this rotation were just plain
trouble makers. They kept quizzing me on stupid stuff, and at one point
we had a baby rabbit in, with it's bone sticking out. One of the guys
looks at me and says really condescendingly "this is a complete
fracture, and the bone is showing." So, I just gave him this, don't
patronize me look and said "I know, I can see." Yeah, I'm didn't really
make any friends on that rotation.Later that day we had a
lecture on bovine reproduction, and Dr. Asokan (asho-can) gave it. He's
the one who nicknamed me "the master inseminator." He's so funny, he is
such an animated guy. I'll have to give you my impression of him when I
get home. Then, yesterday we all went to a research facility
about 1hour from Madras where they are researching different breeds of
all different animals, to see how they would fare here in India. They
are crossing Jersey cattle with a native sindi cow, to try to increase
milk yield, but still have them be heat tolerant. They also have
buffalo that they are working with. This place has 700 acres of land,
and spread out on that is stations for cows, rabbits, pigs (the
piggery-how funny is that?) sheep, goats, fish and ostriches. The
ostriches they have are the only ostriches in India, and they are 4
years now, they seem to be handling the heat allright, but who knows if
it will ever turn into anything. The sheep they have are really funny
looking, if you didn't know better you would call them goats. They
don't really have wool, it's short hair like a goat. At the end of that
day, we were thouroughly exhausted. We were in the sun for a long time
(I didn't get burnt, but some others did-good old doxy!) We went in for
a break to the canteen, and the woman set water in front of us, however
we all saw her take it from the faucet, so we couldn't drink it. It was
the worst kind of torture possible. Here we are dehydrated so much that
we don't even feel the need to use the gross and disgusting bathrooms
the whole day, and they put water we can't have in front of us. The
joys of India. We drank hot tea instead. It's boiled, so we're safe
with hot drinks, that's just the last thing you want to be drinking
when your core temp is really elevated. But JoAnn saved us all. After
getting back and having dinner, we went to the food mart and she bought
ice cream. It was a very nice surprise. We ran home to keep it from
melting, and we savored every drop. Many people licked their plate
clean. The small joys in life. We are leaving in about an hour
to go on a little weekend excursion. We are going to see some temples
and other old buildings. The joy of this for some of the other people
is that we are staying in a hotel with a real shower, not just a
bucket. I rather like the bucket method, and all the other adventurous
things we get to do here. It's like camping, where you just adapt and
get used to it, soon you don't even notice that it's odd to use only
1/8 of a bucket of water to rinse 3 days worth of dirt and grime off of
you, in the interest of conserving water. He, he, I'll leave
you with a funny quote from Heidi the day we were at the beach and she
stepped in something really gross: "It's exactly as bad as I'd hoped it
wasn't."
