Come and see

After a very busy and very adventurous few days we changed course and started learning the routines of the hospital. On the morning of the second we were up at 6:30 to be unnecessarily ready for morning chapel at 7:30 before accompanying Anil on 8:30 rounds. We were almost constantly in the way, especially the first couple days, but he took pains to help us feel engaged to the point that we started connecting with some of the patients in unexpected ways. The hospital wards are located on the east end of the complex, immediately adjacent to the chapel. We began each day with a tour through the ICU where stroke victims, alcoholics, TB patients, and the comatose congregate in that space where life is quantified by oxygen saturation, blood pressure, and the precious beep of beating hearts. From there it was through a back room to the nursery where two babies were struggling in needle-pricked slumbers for a chance at more tomorrows. Then it was out the women’s ward to pass through a score of dirty beds with a score of dirty bodies mending stitches of organs pierced on the table by blades and gloves that have surely seen the inner workings of another. They lie with dust and flies under the watchful eyes of their families, the knowing eyes of the nurses, and the caring eyes of the doctors. We would then stop through a handful of private rooms for wealthier women before heading upstairs to check in on renovations of the former ICU where day laborers mix concrete by hand, chisel down bricks and mortar, and brace their walls with warped bamboo poles. Just outside this noisy mess is the musky men’s ward where a dozen urine bags hung from ratty blankets flagging the healing bodies screaming for water. Our tour then took us to a row of more private rooms, one where a boy would always cry because Anil’s presence meant a needle stick, and one where a 20 year old woman lay in mosquito netting and took down 40 eggs a day through her nose, material to repair flesh brutally scorched in a cook stove explosion. Such was the morning round, checking up on life’s beginnings and endings.

For us then, it was back to our place for breakfast, usually eggs and toast with hot water for instant coffee and then off to work on an activity until lunch hour around 2:30. Molly and I spent one day working with Annkita’s computer trying to update software and connect to the internet so she could complete her tenth grade project, a movie on rural healthcare. While Tadd turned his attentions to the accounting office, Barb, Nancy, Molly, and I spent the next two days painting the outer façade of the hospital and attempting to learn snippets of Hindi much to the toothless bemusement of our gawking local entourage. Being trained more in skills of the mind than skills of the hand, we were less than clean (though in our defense the paint was so thin it was like brushing water) but after a few coats and a few touch-ups the hospital entrance now shines in fire-engine-red glory.

Early one morning, as the 5:30 Call to Prayer sent its invitation drifting through the dampened air, my jet-lagged mind spent some time thinking and reflecting. As the dewdrops give form to the intangible fluid, anchoring their place tips of grass they do not choose, playing their part in their own cycle of life, some amorphous ideas coalesced in my mind while I was scratching my mosquito bites in the epic hours. The previous day the Muslim TB woman was taken out of the ICU by her uncaring husband, who no longer wanted to foot her bills and had completely washed his hands of her imminent death. Later in the evening, the young burn victim was also taken by her family and by this hour had surely passed beyond her physical agonies. I was frustrated to confront this bitter failure of care and I started trying to wrap my head around the issues. The best I could come up with was a question to myself, “How I would handle Japanese encephalitis were it to strike now?” I would pray and I would trust. How does the burn patient handle her state? She probably prays in the way she knows and trusts those she has been taught to trust – it is what she knows and in her state perhaps she was more comforted by a family-nested death than potentially life saving care in an invasive and foreign environment. If someone doesn’t want to be cared for, what can you do? I asked Anil later that day and he gave the same answer I found: nothing. We can want but you cannot force reception. It’s kind of the reverse of an old Coachman adage, “Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.” There is nothing but energy intensive education that may change their minds.

One afternoon we also manned the game stations at the Rambo Memorial English School (RMES) New Year’s Fair, the setup for which was a classic epic of culture clash. We were told to arrive for setup at 10 am, but knowing how things work, Nancy and Molly didn’t show up until noonish (Barb went to OT with Anil, Tadd was doing accounting, and I was content to paint). But there was nothing to do and no one who understood English so they returned for a lunch break. We went back between one and two, as the fair was supposed to start at two and we wanted to be ready ahead of time. Silly us. We ended up doing some more sitting around until about 1:45 when the guy we were supposed to be working with rolled in and told us that we were meant to have all the supplies for the games. This was a huge and frustrating surprise because we were told that he would have everything we needed the previous day at the end of a 40 minute meeting conducted almost exclusively in Hindi. Anyhow we went panicking around the hospital trying to drum up a ring toss and five balls but a stop at Ft. Henry and a quick word with Theresa proved to be our saving grace: she had all the supplies from the previous year’s fair in storage. So, we went back to the school and set everything up by 2:30, just as the kids were arriving. We may have been a little under prepared materially, but we were decidedly under prepared mentally for the dizzying onslaught of orderless excitement that greeted us. The kids threw their game tickets at us with reckless abandon, pleading and squabbling amongst themselves for position. Ahh it felt like Agra all over again…they learn to fight but they also learn how to accept not getting what they want, for when all the prizes were gone, even those who didn’t win walked away happy.

That night I spent some time trying unsuccessfully to get the blog pictures up. As I was clicking away on Terry’s computer, Barb, Nancy, and Molly came over to say that Anil had called us in for a caesarian along with Shaiku, Parveen, and Annkita. Having children in the OR or OT (operating theatre) as they call it made the show into quite a spectacle. Their innocent and curious commentary made half of the procedure a continuous chuckle, and it was refreshing to see stoic procedure undercut by wonder. But even as the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the 60’s have shown, after discovering we must categorize to understand, and this inevitably leads to another establishment. We were privy to the reason behind the establishment of OT methods as the doctors labored in their furious formality to extract a dying baby, who was passing stool in his final panic mechanism, a feeble instinctual attempt to clutch at a life he did not know. “Not good,” Anil’s words tersely described a situation we didn’t understand as the mother quaked and moaned. In the end, the baby and the mother are ok and, after our harrowing structural lesson, we were left with an emotional treat: an image of Shaiku and Parveen touching the soft hands of a fresh life, still specked with gore from his first brush with death, a death prevented only by generations of knowledge manifested in the right place at just the right time by the sweaty team beside them, routinely closing up another patient.

On our final day as a group, we went over to the school for morning activities (morning formation is probably a better description) sans Tadd, who had unfortunately fallen ill during the night. The uniformed children lined up by grade and, led by their upper class prefects, performed an elaborate nationalist ritual of salutes, chants, and songs that put the Pledge of Allegiance to shame. We then setup the new school library, a single bookshelf enclosing five boxes of books held under lock and key, and took a tour of the school classes. I think we were all initially very unimpressed with their educational structure – particularly with the fact that it is an English school where the teachers can hardly form coherent sentences, but after being around the area a bit longer and getting a sense of daily life, even that palsied touch of knowledge is the best bet these kids have of a better life. We toured the school with Rev. Sona, a minister, retired teacher, and now principal of the school (in typical small-town fashion, everyone here has at least three jobs). We wandered through bare rooms packed with children who stood and issue well-metered greetings of “good morning sir” and “good morning ma’am”, politely rehearsing for the strangers peering in on their worlds. But, at recess the kids ran wild, their white teeth and eyes flashing against sun-browned skin. Their starched attentions turned to dynamic hoards chanting, clapping, tussling, and throwing pebbles. They are good kids. A group of young ones, not more than five years old, stood at a distance, being not yet able to navigate the playground’s physical or social structures they played in smaller ways amongst themselves. One moment, in particular, stands out in my mind – a little boy with peek-a-boo shoes throwing arches of red dust into the crowded air, a chaotic creation which framed well the playground tangle of child-motion.

In the midst of all this activity came a question Nancy asked as she was thinking about our time here, “How did you serve God in India?” The answer to that question is tricky. Before leaving I had a talk with my brother about the formation of habit, a point that I lifted from many poolside lectures at Kenyon. The idea is that we don’t suddenly become someone new without making it happen, or without allowing it to happen. Daily life here has its differences, but they are differences to which we slowly allow ourselves to be come accustomed. When the glossy feeling of newness wears off we find that life is, yet again, just life, and each day is just another day. In this sense it can become easy to wonder, how did I serve God?

“Come and see” was our invitation, an invitation with many layers, but centered on the connection between us and them. We have done many things in India– eaten her foods, shopped in her strange markets, choked down her dust, wandered amongst her monuments, shared smiles and unspoken understanding, seen new life brought forth, and watched neglected life slip away. We’ve formed relationships, which however temporary they may end up being, have left impressions that are sure to last a lifetime. We were given a short window of opportunity to laugh and cry and wonder, and to construct with our individual gifts something with bettered the life of another. So how did we serve God? In the same ways we did at home, for action is our tool but shaping a humble and contrite heart is our true service, a service which knows no bounds within any activity and which requires no place to perform. Come and see – an invitation as welcoming as you allow it to be.

~ by packerk on January 17, 2009.