Culture Shock

Finally here!  I arrived in Delhi at about 1pm on Tuesday, local time.  My flight was delayed out of DFW so I missed the connecting flight in London.  The next flight to Delhi was 8 hours later, but the long layover did give me a chance to stop by and say hello to Parliament and Westminster Abbey.

Once I finally got to Delhi, Zarema, the coordinator for foreign medical student electives, picked me up from the airport and took me to a YWCA.  Nothing fancy, but adequate, and I got a private room and bathroom.  After getting settled, Zarema took me to the market to go shopping for Indian dresses, called “salwar kameezes.”  Pictures to follow. 

To and from the market, we took an auto rickshaw, which is a 3-wheeled golf cart-type vehicle that is cheaper than a taxi.  Auto rickshaws have no doors, and instead of being controlled with a steering wheel they have what looks like motorcycle handlebars.  Driving in Delhi is every man for himself.  Lane markings are suggestions at best, and cars travel mere inches away from each other.  Cars squeeze 4-wide on streets that are supposed to be 3 lanes, and even then motorcycles still whiz by around the edges.  When traffic does come to a stop, young girls selling flowers weave barefoot in between the cars looking for buyers.  Car horns are used liberally here, and not with aggression like in the U.S. but out of politeness, to let the car ahead of you know you are approaching.  Larger commercial vehicles even have written across the back “Horn Please.”  The result is constant honking from all directions.

I got up early this morning to catch the train to Dehradun.  When I arrived at the train station, a porter approached the car and we negotiated a price for him to carry my bag to the platform and load it onto the train.  The porters carry the bags on top of their heads, and some that I saw were even carrying 2 bags stacked on top of each other.  Like everything in India, the train cars adhere to a caste system.  As a foreigner, I am outside this system and do not belong to any particular caste, but the amount of money I am able to pay for a train ticket defaults me to an upper caste.  My train car was air conditioned with plush seats, and every traveler had a cell phone and an MP3 player.  In the lower caste cars, many travelers did not even have shoes.

The 6-hour train ride to Dehradun allowed me to see quite a bit of India.  The poverty is impossible to imagine, and almost too much to even take in.  The slums stretch for miles, many with only a tarp or large cloth for a roof.  Cows roam freely in the streets, and wild dogs and pigs sniff through endless piles of trash looking for bits of food.  In the fields and even by the train tracks people squat to defecate, with a large water bottle in hand to clean themselves (the left hand is reserved for this task, which is why Indians eat only with the right hand).  I had read about all of this before coming here but it was still shocking to actually see.

An employee of the hospital was waiting to meet me at the train station when I arrived in Dehradun, and we drove together to the hospital in Herbertpur about an hour away.  The hospital is a large campus with a separate gated residential area when the doctors, nurses and staff live.  There are about 100 inpatient beds as well as several general and specialty outpatient clinics.  There is another American medical student here, Kathryn, who has already been here for a week.  I will meet her tomorrow and work with her on the Internal Medicine team. 

For now, it’s almost time for dinner, so I’ll be headed to the cafeteria soon.  I’m feeling tired and a little home sick, but I think a good night’s sleep will make a world of difference.  I posted a few pictures, with more to come.  I'm having trouble posting videos right now, but I'll work on it.  Thank you for keeping me in your prayers.