Kendra in India: May 20th

Monday:

So today we were invited by Dr. Prabhakar of Green vision to visit GITAM Hospital. It's a private hospital associated with GITAM university. When we arrived we were impressed with the two large buildings. One of them was for the hospital which was nine stories tall and the other was for a medical school. After the hospital is in operation (hopefully sometime this summer) and receives approval they will begin the medical school and have 150 students each year. There were a few things that were interesting about the hospital. First, they did have elevators but they also had a large ramp to get from floor to floor. We figured it was just in case of a power outage but GITAM has it's own power source and therefore doesn't need to worry about it. The second interesting thing was the separation between females and males. We've seen this separation starting with airport security where the ladies will go through a separate detector and are searched behind a curtain for privacy. In the hospital setting it is used in part to encourage women to come. Here women are over the household and they don't tell people if they are sick due to social stigma or because that means the family money will need to be spent on them instead of something else. The separation in the hospital helps with the former. It also of course is mainly cultural. 

...

After the hospital we went to Sudha's house, which is on campus, for lunch. She went all out and was so excited to have us there. After sitting in her front room for a little bit she asked us if we wanted to go into the AC room. It was a smallish room with a large bed and couch thing. We ended up eating in there which was quite refreshing from the unfinished hospital. Lunch was made up of a soup (much like a chicken noodle soup broth and one of our favorites), wraps with chicken and sheep, fresh raw vegetables (cucumbers, onions, and carrots...oh how we've missed them), little chicken pieces on toothpicks, the main meal which consisted of rice and four types of curries, and then finished off with a fruit salad and ice cream. I don't think we could have been fed a bigger meal. And all of it tasted amazing! Madhu (one of the translators who LOVES to cook and is constantly telling us types of food we need to request) turned to us and said with a giant smile 'this is Indian food.' If Madhu was impressed you know it was good. 

We finished off the day walking to the beach. We spent a couple hours taking pictures and having our FHE. There was one guy who kept trying to sell us sea urchins claiming that we could use them for smoking. We tried to get him to go away but he wouldn't. A little later he showed us one with the spines taken off and it was quite beautiful. Jamie decided she wanted it. She went over to him and asked if he would give it to her. He did and then started haggling over price. Jamie kept shaking her head at his price and saying free. Finally he gave in and she got this beautiful sea urchins for free. Dr. Nuckolls was impressed she was able to out Jawari a Jawari. 

...

After we came home Durga pulled out a chocolate cake. It was Raju and her's 5th wedding anniversary. We felt a little weird since the cake was for her yet she wouldn't have some until all of us were served and almost finished. (and we did get them gifts earlier that day). 

Yesterday was the last day of the conference. We were told that we were going to a diabetes conference. That was true since those that were attending all focused on diabetes. However the conference was really on bioinformatics. What does that mean? Good question. Basically every paper looked at how to relate proteins in mathematical way. I didn't follow a single presentation. But that's ok. The main reason we were there was to make connections with people at the universities to help distribute our survey.

Dr. Nuckolls is the second from the left

Which we did, even though no one was able to grasp what we were doing with our survey. One guy who is one of the leading diebotologist in India told us that the journal he worked with (International Journal of Diabetes I believe) wouldn't print our work because it was too common. He then gave an example of how his wife did a survey a while ago on the prevalence of Diabetes. He couldn't grasp that our survey was looking at knowledge of diabetes to lead to the prevention of the disease. Preventive measures though are not common here. But the conference overall was a success and we are making good headway on our project. 

I love you all,

Kendra