INDIA catch up

Digesting my trip to India has taken a while, but I feel like I've finally come to some conclusions about the time I spent there.

1. General - medical work is emotionally and physically demanding. There's a lot of poverty (which means limited resources) and a lot of work to be done. I also think that because of the language barrier, it would have been better to do work in India after more training and experience in the field. Yet for all that, I'm really glad I went - because I truly learned a lot about medicine and people (including myself.)

2. Travel/tourism - Part of what is so exhausting about travel in India is dealing with aggressive rickshaw drivers and booth owners attempting to 'barter' (aka - get as much money as possible from you.) Being American, you also get the celebrity treatment from people and it can be exhausting shaking hands, signing autographs and posing for photographs (especially when you're not important.)

3. People - Please note that this is an extreme overgeneralization because I never traveled to the South of India and stayed in mainly one region. I will say that the poverty is worn on people's faces, like a white flag is flown in surrender. There is resignation and hopelessness. I feel especially like Hinduism has (through it's teachings on reincarnation etc) been a particularly repressive influence on the people. What hope is there to make a better life, when you're taught that whatever 'caste' you're born into you're stuck in? I liked the Maharastreans though , as they were kind to me.

There were four other girls in the program with me... Taj (from MA/Atlanta) in Public Health, Han (from PA) in pre-med, Avanti (from TX/Indian descent) in med school, and Maya (from MI) in nursing. We all got along pretty well, which is a blessing, having spent a month together non-stop. (Taj even traveled the last two weeks in Northern India with me when we visited the Himalayas and the Golden Triangle.)

4. Food - Mostly we ate chipati (which is a fantastic tortilla-like flatbread in India.) We also had daal, rice, meat (not much because it's better to be veg), and masala. We ate with our hands.

5. Favorite memories.... undoubtedly, my favorite time spent in India was in the most northern region I visited, up in the Himalayas. The people there were more Nepalese/Mongolian/Tibetan-looking than really Indian. There were buddhist prayer flags everywhere and people were extremely warm. I must say, speaking topographically, that the landscape was not what I had expected. It was hot and our town at 11,000 ft boasted no snow. In fact, there wasn't even snow at 14,000 ft which was a surprise for this mountain girl from Wyoming. (Though there was snow at 17,600 ft, the summit of one of our trips.) Ask me sometime about my surviving a raging river, on the border with China, by being carried piggy-back style.... it's quite comical.