How Was India?

I know now that I am back, there will be many people wanting to ask me this question, and I've been thinking about how I can respond.  I really don't know how to answer it succinctly.   It was amazing.  But that doesn't really do it.  It was too many things to even get into in one conversation.  It was beautiful and sad and inspiring and discouraging and fun and challenging and thrilling and funny and awful and uplifting and difficult...


Was it what you expected?  In some ways yes, but mostly no.  I had envisioned doing heroic things, making strides for humanity and for the Lord.  Delivering babies with one hand and suturing wounds with the other; having profound conversations about God's love and mercy.  Well, maybe not quite as grand as all that but something like it.  And that's not exactly what happened.  I ran headfirst into so many limitations: the hospital's facilities, the peoples' perspectives, the health care system in India, the language barrier... but mostly my own limitations: the limits of my medical knowledge and skills, and the limits of my faith.  I began to re-examine why God had brought me there.  If I wasn't saving lives and saving souls what was I called there to do? 

There is, of course, the possibility that God is working in ways bigger than I can see.  That I did, in fact, make some difference in people's lives that I'll never really know.  And I have faith that that's true to some extent.  But I'm also beginning to suspect that maybe India didn't need me so much as I needed India.  That hospital was plugging along just fine before I came and they'll continue to carry on without me.  But I will not be the same.  There is something at work in me, so much that God wants me to learn from all this.  I have been so flooded with experiences that I haven't even begun to sort through them all yet.  It'll take months, at least, of personal debriefing and reflection to decipher out all the lessons God is trying to teach me.  Please pray He'll give me wisdom.


I didn't end up learning that much Hindi while I was there.  It's such a departure from the Germanic and Romance languages that I'm accustomed to that my ear doesn't even recognize some of those sounds.  I learned a few words, for hello, thank you, please, yes, no.  But the one sentence I did learn may be one of the best things that can be said, and I think kind of sums things up nicely...

"Jai masih ki"

Praise the Lord

Agra Trip

Finally home!  My bed is even more comfortable than I remember.


My last day in India, I made the trip to the city of Agra about a 3 1/2 hour drive from Delhi.  I hired a personal driver, Raj, who also served as my personal tour guide for the day.  Our first stop was Akbar's Tomb.

Entrance to Akbar's Tomb

Akbar was a Mughal emperor in the 1500's and is still well loved by the people of India.  His tomb is made of this beautiful red sandstone.  Shoes are removed before entering, and once through the entrance room, there is a long narrow tunnel that opens up into a huge cavernous vault.   In the center is Akbar's burial site.  A man stands next to the grave and greets visitors, and when I entered he extended a flower blossom to me, placed it in my hand, then put his hand on my head and said, "Long life," then gestured towards the grave.  Taking his cue, I placed the flower blossom on the grave, so I think I have now been blessed by Akbar.

Next we headed further into Agra and finally arrived at the gate to the Taj Mahal.  The line to get in wrapped back and forth in front of the entrance, and Raj had no intention of waiting so he said, "We go a secret way."  He lead me down an winding alleyway past little shops and fruit carts, then turned abruptly into a small doorway and up the steepest stairs ever constructed.  The stairway opened up into another alleyway, which we followed until all the sudden we were at a back gate to the Taj. There was almost no line, so we walked right in.  So nice to have someone who knows these little secrets.

After walking through the security gate, we see one of the 3 main gates to the Taj Mahal...

Gate to the Taj

Then, after walking through the gate, this...

 

It was amazing, so beautiful.  Made entirely of white marble.  It was really breath-taking. 

We walked up through the garden and then removed our shoes before walking up the solid marble steps to the entrance.  There are intricate carvings everywhere.  It's easy to see why this took 22 years to complete.  There are 4 rooms encircling the mausoleum at the center, and in the very middle, directly under the huge dome, is the grave of the emperor's wife with his grave right next to hers.

It's really a sweet story, the emperor building this incredible burial site for his wife who died in child-birth.  What's less sweet is how he chopped off the hands of every man who helped build it so they could never build another one like it.  Yikes.

We spent a while just marveling at the Taj, then had time for one more stop.  Near Agra is a town called

Vrindavan, the birth place of Krishna, one of the Hindu gods.  This is a very holy city to Hindus, and there are about 5,500 temples in this one area.  Followers of Krishna from around the world converge on this spot to worship and live.  Raj took me to one of the temples not too far off the highway.  We took our shoes off before going inside (they're big on this practice, as you can tell), and the first thing that hit me were the beautiful aromas inside.   To put it tactfully, India is not the most pleasantly fragrant place on earth, so after weeks of inhaling India-smell, the scents of flowers and incense were so gorgeous and refreshing.  The temple was beautiful.  Gold and marble and lush fabrics everywhere.  It was full of worshipers, some walking around admiring the alters, some kneeling to kiss the floor, many sitting on the floor in a group singing, chanting and playing instruments.  There were 3 alters to Krishna at the front.

Inside the Hindu temple

I was surprised how many white faces I saw in the temple.  Raj told me that for whatever reason, Krishna is a popular deity for Hindus in the West, and many Hindu Americans leave everything behind to come to this place.

Seeing the temple was a very complicated and emotional experience.  First I felt very uncomfortable, like it wasn't right for me to be there somehow.  Then, sadness.  I watched the people grovel and chant and sing and felt such love and such sadness for them.  They're so obviously searching and longing, but they're just missing it.  I admit that in the past I have toyed with the idea that all world religions are just grasping at the same thing; that we all worship the same God but just in different ways that are bound by the cultures in which we find ourselves.  Even if that's true, being in the Hindu temple really brought home to me that there is something that Christ gives that nothing else can provide.  I am nothing, but the Creator and King of the universe somehow loves me.  So much, in fact, that He took on this lowly dirty form of man and suffered, just so we could be reconciled to each other and be together.  What a deep and profound joy that is!  What a privilege it is to be able to have a personal relationship with the Almighty.  How unfathomable.  My heart breaks for those who are missing out on this.  I said a prayer for them and specifically for Raj as we left.

Saying Goodbye

Today Katie and I made another visit to Dehradun and went a little further into the city this time.  Now that I'm about to leave, I'm starting to feel like I'm getting the hang of a few things around here.  For example, today on our way to Dehradun an auto rickshaw wanted to charge us 150 rupees for a ride that I know should have cost about 10.  I'm sorry, I'm white but I'm not stupid.

I found a bank that would cash my traveler's checks (that was way more of a hassle than I expected it to be), then found a nice restaurant for lunch.  Still, even a nice restaurant only ended up costing us the equivalent of about $7 each.  It was just refreshing to have something besides rice, dal, and roti. 

After lunch, we found a McDonald's and just had to check it out.  If you had told me that we live in a world where there exists a McDonald's that doesn't serve hamburgers I might not have believed you before today.  Not a single hamburger on the entire menu.  Their "Big Mac" is called a "McVeggie," and it's a veggie burger.  I'm not making this up.  There was also something called a "Veggie Surprise," but I had no desire to discover what the surprise is.  Since we weren't feeling adventurous enough to try anything else on the menu, we each just got an ice cream cone and I can thankfully say that it tasted just like home.

We did a little more shopping, browsed the bazaar for a while, and headed back to Herbertpur.  Public transportation in India is always an adventure.  To get to Dehradun from Herbertpur, you have to first take a bus for about an hour, then a vikram for about half an hour.  A vikram is similar to an auto rickshaw in that it only has 3 wheels and no door on one side, but it's a little bit bigger and functions more like a bus than a taxi, having a specified route it travels and people jumping on and off.  A vikram really seats 6 people, but 8 and sometimes 9 are routinely crammed in.  I was the 8th person to squeeze into our vikram today, 9th if you count the child on her mother's lap, and I had to sit sideways and hang an arm out the window to fit.  The buses are equally crowded.  At one point the bus was so full that there was one person hanging out the open door, holding on only through an open window.  Fortunately, there were always a couple of gentlemen around to offer us their seats so we never had to stand too long.  We always attract conversation on the buses, people asking where we're from, what we're doing here, wanting to practice their English.  I tell all kinds of lies like "yes, I've been here quite a while... yes, my husband's here, too... yes, Katie's also married... My last name?  Simpson..."  I'm sure no one means any harm, but you never know.  The high school kids are always the most fun because they seem to be the most unashamedly fascinated and enthralled by us.  One girl told me today that I look like Maria Sharapova.  I don't know, we're both white and blonde...?

Tomorrow will be my last day in the hospital.  I'll work through the morning, then I'll leave for the train station in Dehradun at about 3:30 tomorrow afternoon.  I have so many mixed feelings about leaving.  On the one hand, I can't wait to get home and see Ryan, and take hot showers and sleep in my own comfortable bed and eat my normal food.  But on the other hand I feel like it's too soon to leave.  I just got here and I feel like I haven't done enough yet, haven't really made a difference yet.  There's so much need here, not only among the people we treat but also within the hospital itself; the doctors being so overworked, the facilities being so limited, so underfunded.  I feel like there's so much left to do.  I really hope that I was able to be of some help.

As tonight is my last night in the hospital, it will be my last blog post before I return home.  I'll arrive in Delhi late Tuesday night, then spend Wednesday on a trip to the Taj Mahal, then head to the airport late Wednesday night.  Once I get home I'll post my final adventures and reflections and finally upload some pictures.  Thank you so much for your prayers for my safe return.  I'll see you Stateside...

Isaiah 58:11

It was a beautiful day here today.  The monkeys seemed to notice, too, and they played outside the window during church this morning.  At the end of the service, the pastor announced to the congregation that I would be leaving this week, then invited me up to lead the closing prayer.  It took me a little off guard to be put on the spot like that, but I appreciated it and was grateful to be able to participate in that way.

This afternoon the hospital kicked off its cricket tournament, playing for the Herbertpur Christian Hospital Cup.  I sat and watched and tried to make some sense of what was going on.  There was a lot of yelling in Hindi, and a lot of laughing and cheering and clapping and pointing and gesturing, and I have no idea what any of it meant.  I made some comment about baseball to the Westerners around me, and Goli, the woman from Switzerland, said, "Isn't cricket basically the same thing?"  I don't know what kind of look I must have had on my face but before I could even respond she said, "Oh, sorry."

Nikki, the nurse from Washington state, left a couple of days ago.  But before she did, she, Katie and I got together and prayed with each other and for each other.  We prayed for each other's safety, and we prayed for trust and wisdom and strength.  Mostly we thanked God for bringing the 3 of us all here together at the same time.  He knew we would be here before we did, and He provided for our every need, even companionship.  One of the passages we read in church this morning was Isaiah 58:11... "The Lord will guide you always; He will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame.  You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail."  How true that is, and how faithful He is.

Brunch

This morning I enjoyed a lovely brunch with some of the ladies of the hospital.

There is a Swiss couple here, both doctors, who are visiting for a couple of months with their two sons, ages 3 years and 18 months.  (The kids seem immune to culture shock and appear to feel right at home.  It's amazing.)  The husband and wife alternate days working in the hospital while the other stays home and watches the children.  The guest house where they are staying has a little garden in front, so when the Medical Director’s wife offered to make us all brunch, their garden seemed like the perfect spot.  Katie and I went over early to help Goli, the Swiss woman, bring a coffee table and chairs out into the sun, then the Director's wife, a doctor at the hospital herself, brought over pancakes made from scratch with honey.  Another doctor's wife was there, and she brought a south Indian dish called idli, which is a bread-type thing made out of rice and lentils and dipped in tomato chutney.  So yummy.  Fruit salad and Western coffee rounded out the meal.  The weather was perfect, sunny and warm.  The two Indian women brought their children, too, and all the kids, Indian and Swiss alike, played together on a blanket in the shade of a big tree.  Another woman we all knew happened to walk by, so she stopped to sit and chat and eat for a while.  It was really lovely.

Today is the first day of the World Cup of cricket.  It goes from now until the beginning of April, I think, and it's a huge deal here.  I walked up to Vikas Nagar to do some shopping this afternoon, and every shopkeeper had the game playing on his television.  The hospital is even having its own cricket tournament among the men on staff.  I feel like someone should tell them about baseball.

Mobile Clinic, Part 2

Today I went to another Mobile Clinic, a little further out than the one I visited before.  The drive out there is so beautiful.  The forests are so green, even in the winter.  And I thought the hospital was in a rural setting, but this place was really rural.  We worked to the sounds of goats bleating, and the jiggling of jingle bells on horses and the clip-clop of ox's hooves on the road as they pulled carts stacked with sticks, grasses, or mustard plants.  The clinic site was a small room detached from the home of a large multi-generational Muslim family, who allows the hospital to use their property once a week for our clinic.  The room had concrete walls and floor, and a tin roof held up by skinny logs.  The wall facing the street was partly made up of wire grating, and at around 2:00, after school let out, a large group of girls all dressed in matching school uniforms crowded around to peer inside at the white person.  I'm pretty fascinating. 

The family who loaned us the clinic site was very kind and gracious, and even served us all chi half way through the day.  The patriarch invited us back to see the large courtyard and stables where he kept several cows, a few goats, and a puppy that antagonized the goats.  One of his older daughters was pumping water from a pump to give to the cows.  The father led two of his younger children up to me and grinned at my camera.  I snapped a photo of the two of them and showed dad the image on the screen, and he gushed and smiled and thanked me.  I wish I had had a polaroid for him to keep. 

Last night was movie night.  Katie brought a few DVDs from home, and so last night she, Nikki and I huddled under a blanket in front of Katie's laptop and watched When Harry Met Sally.  So much fun.  A little taste of home.

Casualties

Today started out slow, but a little after 3pm Casualty got hectic. 

We had 2 patients with incredible pneumothoraces (collapsed lungs).  I've never seen chest x-rays that looked like these, even in text books.  The collapsed lung on both patients was about the size of a golf ball.  I took pictures of the films.  The most common cause of a pneumothorax in this area of course is TB, which seems to be the most common cause of a lot of medical aliments here.  So I spent part of my day restraining patients' flailing limbs while the doctor put in chest tubes.

One woman came in completely delirious, alternating back and forth between wailing in pain and singing.  She had fallen off her roof while she was hanging clothes out to dry, and the hematoma on her forehead made it pretty clear she had hit her head.  The hospital doesn't have a CT scanner, so we had to send her to the nearest town for a CT of her head, then she'll return here for treatment.  She has been seen at the hospital before: 6 months ago, when she gave birth to her son. 

Another man with either pneumonia or TB (not sure yet) came in with a O2 sat of 68% on room air.  Ideally, you'd like your O2 sat to be at 100%, or at least 93%.  He was in bad shape.  We admitted him to the ICU.

And one woman had nothing physically wrong at all that we could find.  She was complaining of generalized abdominal pain, and every time we asked exactly where the pain was she pointed to a different spot.  She also said her chest kind of hurt, her arms and legs kind of hurt...  I suspected it at first, but after all her tests and labs came back normal, I was pretty convinced this was entirely psychosomatic.  It's incredibly common here, even more so than in the States.  This is a culture in which neither men or women are expected to show emotions; they are a very stoic people.  All that suppression is bound to catch up with you eventually, and it usually manifests itself as very vague physical symptoms.  A pain here, an ache there, a loss of appetite.  This occurs in both genders, but seems to be harder on the women.  Nothing to do but reassure her that she's OK.  Let this be a lesson to us all: let it out, your body will thank you.