One week...

Hard to believe we’ve already been here in Vellore for an entire week.

Per the explicit request of a very special lady, I’m attaching a few shots of where I’m staying (small ones—hope that’s sufficient, Mom).

1) View from the middle of campus 2) The Canteen (best Dosas around) 3) Our room at the Guest House 4) Just a couple nerds on their first day of school.... 5) The Community Hospital where we'll be spending a bit of time





The campus is quiet and comfortable… you really can’t complain about AC when it’s 109 degrees outside… with uniformed guards stationed at all of the gates (they too are fond of the Wobble, every time I wave hello), so the campus feels like a world away from the loud and congested township. There’s a bit of a community here, with medical, nursing, and physical therapy students each living in separate (and gender-segregated) hostels, as well as various visiting students, college staff, and many of the actual hospital physicians also living on campus.

As for my actual purpose for arriving in Vellore… We’ve begun classes with the second year medical students here at CMC (who are, for the most part, about 19 years old because they begin medical school immediately following high school). The three of us are joining them for their two week rotation in Community Health. Interestingly, this is a mandatory unit for ALL medical students, and gives them a thorough and firsthand introduction into the key principles of public health… In the US, we’re encountering this sort of curriculum only as part of an optional, second degree program, not seen by the overwhelming majority of medical students. The things that they’re covering seem SO vital to the practice of medicine… it strikes me more than ever that this ‘extra’ public health stuff shouldn’t be extra at all.

On our first afternoon, we joined them on a field visit to a nearby village. The rickety bus climbed a winding road up through the mountains, where all 60 or so med students (plus the three white folks) spilled out into the narrow, sloping streets of this tiny rural community. The class divided up into small groups to go home to home conducting what’s called a morbidity survey… interviewing the families about each person living in the home, their age/education/health status, etc. I won’t bother explaining all the details, but it was impressive to see this kind of simple, necessary public health groundwork being conducted by students on day one. It was also amazing to see the village, while my preexisting frame of reference was still very much unshed…

I stepped into the first home and slowly took it all in (my Tamil-speaking classmates were doing the actual survey). It seemed by American standards to be extremely poor—five people living in a small, dusty, unadorned three-room dwelling—but when I asked what socioeconomic status rating this house would receive in the survey, my classmates informed me that this was somewhere in the range of middle class. They must have noticed my chin on the floor, because they hurried to qualify: Having electricity, livestock, and access to running water (from a pump outside the door, not in their actual home) meant they were much better off than many other families. We throw around the term socioeconomic status a lot in discussing public health, but this one afternoon's visit to just a few homes has significantly altered my understanding of the term...

Here's a photo Holly snapped in one of the homes we surveyed:

We also stopped by the small schoolyard in the village and chatted briefly with the teachers there (again, I wasn't doing much of the talking). Most of the students were sitting inside... not sure whether it was a sign of obedience or the heat... but this one little girl stood and stared the entire time we were there. I was so taken by this face:

Side note: The children in India are-- and yes, I'm making a strangely broad generalization-- ALL cute. I'm still partial to one little firecracker back home (Miss Ava, the reigning Cutest Kid). However, it must be noted that so far every child I've seen is adorable. And it's not just because all of their deep chocolate eyes seem to stare straight through my face and into my soul, though that may have something to do with it. I can't promise this blog won't transition into a full-fledged photo-essay on the children of India.