So...

Being sick in India is not fun. I was pretty sure that I was going to die last week, all alone in a tiny, filthy, hotel room, with a fever and chills and severe abdominal pain and a splitting headache that truly appreciated the noisy construction work next door. The chills were actually a welcome relief from the heat, as the temperature went up over 100, and my air conditioner stopped working somewhere around noon on Wednesday. The construction workers didn't stop working though, and there was hammering from 6:30 a.m. every morning till 5:30 a.m. the next morning.

So, my last week in India could have been a bit more fun, I suppose. But I survived, and I'm now recovering in South Africa, where the air is cooler and Dr. Dad makes sure that I carefully take the appropriate doses at the appropriate times so that I can recover IMMEDIATELY and we can do EVERY SINGLE THING on his itinerary.

But before I write anything about South Africa, I wanted to reflect for a moment on my experiences in India. When my plane left the ground in Chennai, I felt a veritable lump in my throat, and it took some sorting through of my emotions to figure out why. Here's some of what I wrote:

The lump in my throat is for what I was and what I had when I came to India, for what I no longer am and no longer have, for what I've left in India, and for what India's left in me. It was also relief to be leaving, guilt at feeling relieved, and simultaneously, not wanting to leave just yet.

I had my heart broken in India, and as I tried to pick up the pieces, I fell in love with the country, with the people, with the expats, and India taught me to love myself again. I'm leaving with a heart not fully healed, but one that is bigger and stronger, and full of newness-- new people, new places, new ideas.

And I know I'll be back. India sinks into your bones; it becomes a part of you; it's an open challenge and rising to meet it makes you a fuller human being. There's so much more of the country I want to see; so much I want to return to. To make sense of India's contradictions is to make sense of your own hypocrisies and flaws.

I was reading Whitman the other day, when this stanza struck me:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then; I contradict myself.
I am large; I contain multitudes.

It so perfectly sums up... well, everything.

Holi, Holi, Holi

This week was Holi, a Hindu festival celebrating the beginning of spring and the radiance of the universe. There are various stories about the origins of the holiday, which you can check out if you want on Wikipedia; I won't write it all out here. Traditionally, though, Holi is the festival of colors, and so everyone dresses in white and throws brightly colored powders at each other. The whole of the Indian population is smudged bright blue, purple, or pink for a week.

I went to the beach on Wednesday with Helen and Jackie (the other two UFS volunteers) and watched brightly colored people playing in the waves. It was partly hilarious, and partly beautiful.



And, ok, these women haven't actually been doused in Holi powder, but they were colorful enough to begin with:



We walked along the beach to Ashtalakshmi Temple, which is dedicated to the eight secondary manifestations of the goddess Lakshmi. Hindus pray to Lakshmi for wealth, in the forms of prosperity, good health, knowledge, strength, progeny, and power. Here's Jackie and me in front of the temple:







Other than going to beaches and temples, my work with Unite For Sight has been going swimmingly. Today we got to practice cataract surgery on a goat's eyeball! We learned the cataract technique, and did the surgery under a microscope, and got a feel for the use of the phacoemulsification machine. It was pretty exciting, but I don't think I'm quite ready to perform cataract surgeries on any human eyes yet; the end result of my surgery was... well, a little messy.





Other than all of that... well, I guess I'm getting mentally prepared for the next leg of the journey-- I leave for South Africa next week! It's hard to believe I've been here for 5 weeks already; the time has flown by.

Just Your Average Monday

Yesterday, for the first time in almost two weeks, there was no eye camp-- which meant I spent the day at Hande Hospital in west Anna Nagar, observing surgeries.

In the morning, there were 4 cataract surgeries-- the technology still amazes me, and Dr. Varman's efficiency in the operating room is incredible. Each surgery only takes him about 15 minutes-- I've seen other doctors take up to 45 minutes to do one intraocular lens replacement.

I spent the afternoon with Dr. Rajiv, a general surgeon, who last had me observing a hemorrhoids surgery. This time, he was stitching up the fractured hand of a man who'd been in a motorbike accident. He'd fractured his fingertip and lost his fingernail, so Dr. Rajiv was essentially stitching the tip of his finger to the base of his nail. But first he had to pull the man's heavy rings off of his swollen, fracture finger... It looked so painful; I'm shuddering now even as I write this.

By evening, I was ready for something a little less bloody, so the two newly arrived volunteers and I took off for Kappaleeshwarar Temple, a beautiful Hindu temple in Mylapore, a district in southern Chennai. The temple is dedicated to the god Shiva, the destroyer, and had minor shrines to his sons, Ganesh and Murugan.






We also managed to catch the tail end of a classical dance performance, which was absolutely beautiful:



Outside the temple, we found a gypsy woman selling beautiful glass jewelry-- I really loved the look of the jewelry by lamplight, so I tried to capture the image, and ended up buying more earrings than I should have.