I keep waiting to hear the thud of stones being thrown or at least a shout from the street, but there is nothing. Instead, I'm sitting in the office with just two other Karuna Trust employees who live on site.
I'm also very hungry, but unable to purchase anything. Why? Bharat Bandh, a nationwide strike - impressive, really. As rising gasoline prices have begun to effect nearly every sector of the economy, a protest against the government policy regarding gasoline has been declared until 6PM today. Word surrounding the event has been mixed as to whether the situation will remain calm, and I was even advised to close the front door in case stones came flying our way. Luckily, things have remained civil. My coworker, who wishes to have his name omitted, has even taken to a quiet protest of his own showing up at the office in a buniyan (traditional casual dress). As I discussed with him the reasons for the protest, I was shocked to realize that gasoline prices here top those in the US. To frame this, I am able to purchase a filling fast-food restaurant dinner here for ~$.80. The fact that gasoline amounts to >$3/gallon really is outrageous. Even with bikes that top 60 mpg, this pricing surely puts a significant stress on the economy.
While the time today has passed somewhat slowly, I did have the opportunity to watch part of Taare Zameen Par, a Hindi film which was very well done (the acting and production anyway, I can't say much for the scripting). I will continue to wait until about 9PM tonight with hopes of dinner shops re-opening. The impact of this strike will be interesting to observe.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Namaste to the babies and the dogs
I am obsessed with the dogs here. They play. They fight. They beg for food. They walk with purpose and destination, high tails matching postured heads, ears up and at a quick trot, down the middle of the road. They pass you and don’t look at you because these quadripeds indeed have a mission. They fight. They get hurt. They heal. Occasionally, they approach with ears back, eyes wide and extend their heads for human touch. They play. They sleep. Sometimes, they curl up on small ledges above busy traffic circles and have the same posture of my own dog in her dog bed and in her warm dog donut shape. India dogs. Nothing in the world like them.
Karuna Trust intern signing in.
I arrived on May 23rd and met Pavi, one of my co-interns, in Bangalore. Sagar joined us that day and then Alex and Juulia the next morning. After a quick stop to meet people at the home office, we went on a tour of the Primary Health Centers (PHCs) Karuna Trust operates. The tour lasted one week. The first stop was Mysore, a three hour bus ride south of Bangalore, to see Manasa. We traveled from Mysore to the BR Hills (three hours southeast of Mysore) where we saw the VGKK medical clinic and boarding school, the PHC at Gumballi and the Community Health Center (a government hospital for high risk pregnancies) at Santa Marahalli.
Manasa is a Karuna-Trust mental health hospital and home for homeless women. The Center provides transportation, rehabilitation, therapy, healthcare and a safe home until the women are ready to return to their families. This is where Pavi will be working for the summer and writing biographies for the women who currently live there.
VGKK is an organization that runs a health clinic and boarding school for tribal children in the BR Hills. Dr. Sudarshan founded his first clinic with VGKK and from there, Karuna Trust and its network of PHCs was developed. The clinic includes a mobile health unit that travels to even more rural villages to provide healthcare. Juulia will be working here for the duration of the summer and working on health promotion among the tribal villages.
Gumballi is down the hill from BR Hills, close to a small bus hub called Yelandur. In addition to usual PHC activities, the clinic runs a mental health, epilepsy, diabetes and hypertension clinic. The clinic provides telemedicine services and a surgeon who performs cataract surgery every Saturday.
Intern #3, Alex, will be working on drug availability and health insurance at the home office in Bangalore.
My project is based on hygiene. My goal is to improve standards of hygiene practice within Karuna-Trust facilities. I have spent the last two weeks traveling to various PHCs and observing current hygiene practices among health workers. The clinics are located in rural areas where clean water, soap, anticeptic agents and protective clothing are rare finds. In the majority of the clinics, phenol and formaldehyde are the primary cleaning supplies. Iodine solution is used to disinfect instruments. Portable autoclaves are present in the clinics participating in surgical procedures, but electricity to power them is frequently missing. I have not seen anyone participate in hand washing, including physicians who frequently move from patient to patient without cleaning their hands. Beyond hand washing, I am also concerned about the lack of foot covers. It is customary not to wear shoes indoors and even the clinics require health workers to be barefoot. I have been barefooted along with the surgeons during various procedures and am always nervous about dropping an instrument on someone’s bare foot or getting splashed with fluids.
Santa Marahalli, the high risk pregnancy center and government-run hospital, has been the facility that concerns me the most. The waiting room is a crowded cement parking lot of swollen bellies, crying babies, restless children, weary relatives, stray dogs that wander into the room from the street, muddy floors, and colonies of flies. The workload of any physician at SM is 24/7 as she not only cares for antenatal patients, but also for those who are delivering and who are post-delivery. General demand is high. Karuna Trust has had a difficult time convincing a physician to stay beyond six months in this facility, as it is a post the doctor does not leave. The doctor lives in the hospital, works in the hospital and demand prevents time off. The post-partum ward is located beyond the waiting area, behind an iron gate in a dusty open-windowed hallway. The windows are open toward the street and without screens. People are able to peer into the windows and see the patients recovering in the wards. There is no privacy here. The lack of screens on the windows allows dust, debris, flies and pollution from the streets to enter the hallway and then into the adjoining wards. The wards are stuffy, hot and fly-infested. The beds are hard, flat cots covered in a single, soiled green sheet. It is here where women lay with their newborn babies recovering from birth.
I am putting together a tutorial to teach safe hygiene practices to the staff at the Karuna Trust PHCs and hospitals. I’m also proposing to train a hygiene officer at each clinic who will have the responsibility of enforcing the tutorial, ordering and restocking hygiene supplies and training new staff members. Lastly, I hope to convince Karuna Trust to provide hand sanitizer to the PHCs, especially where the sink to bed ratio is low. This would require the use of funds, but would be a cost effective and beneficial means of moving towards better hygiene practices. Hopefully I can also spend time at SM and improve the situation in the wards.
As for the interns, we are tough. We have dealt with jungle walks home, at night, missing our torches and tigers growling from behind bushes (was it a tiger? Maybe it was a dog. No, most certainly it was a tiger). We have danced with spiders the size of our fists. We have bathed under the watchful eye of lizards... and monkeys. We ride buses with people in the bus, people on top of the bus and just when you think one more person cannot fit, twenty more jump inside. We have been chased by wild boars while tossing out our mango peels . We have gone in circles trying to identify the lump in the middle of the floor ("monkey poop or berries?").
We are indeed having a blast.
Koren
Karuna Trust intern signing in.
I arrived on May 23rd and met Pavi, one of my co-interns, in Bangalore. Sagar joined us that day and then Alex and Juulia the next morning. After a quick stop to meet people at the home office, we went on a tour of the Primary Health Centers (PHCs) Karuna Trust operates. The tour lasted one week. The first stop was Mysore, a three hour bus ride south of Bangalore, to see Manasa. We traveled from Mysore to the BR Hills (three hours southeast of Mysore) where we saw the VGKK medical clinic and boarding school, the PHC at Gumballi and the Community Health Center (a government hospital for high risk pregnancies) at Santa Marahalli.
Manasa is a Karuna-Trust mental health hospital and home for homeless women. The Center provides transportation, rehabilitation, therapy, healthcare and a safe home until the women are ready to return to their families. This is where Pavi will be working for the summer and writing biographies for the women who currently live there.
VGKK is an organization that runs a health clinic and boarding school for tribal children in the BR Hills. Dr. Sudarshan founded his first clinic with VGKK and from there, Karuna Trust and its network of PHCs was developed. The clinic includes a mobile health unit that travels to even more rural villages to provide healthcare. Juulia will be working here for the duration of the summer and working on health promotion among the tribal villages.
Gumballi is down the hill from BR Hills, close to a small bus hub called Yelandur. In addition to usual PHC activities, the clinic runs a mental health, epilepsy, diabetes and hypertension clinic. The clinic provides telemedicine services and a surgeon who performs cataract surgery every Saturday.
Intern #3, Alex, will be working on drug availability and health insurance at the home office in Bangalore.
My project is based on hygiene. My goal is to improve standards of hygiene practice within Karuna-Trust facilities. I have spent the last two weeks traveling to various PHCs and observing current hygiene practices among health workers. The clinics are located in rural areas where clean water, soap, anticeptic agents and protective clothing are rare finds. In the majority of the clinics, phenol and formaldehyde are the primary cleaning supplies. Iodine solution is used to disinfect instruments. Portable autoclaves are present in the clinics participating in surgical procedures, but electricity to power them is frequently missing. I have not seen anyone participate in hand washing, including physicians who frequently move from patient to patient without cleaning their hands. Beyond hand washing, I am also concerned about the lack of foot covers. It is customary not to wear shoes indoors and even the clinics require health workers to be barefoot. I have been barefooted along with the surgeons during various procedures and am always nervous about dropping an instrument on someone’s bare foot or getting splashed with fluids.
Santa Marahalli, the high risk pregnancy center and government-run hospital, has been the facility that concerns me the most. The waiting room is a crowded cement parking lot of swollen bellies, crying babies, restless children, weary relatives, stray dogs that wander into the room from the street, muddy floors, and colonies of flies. The workload of any physician at SM is 24/7 as she not only cares for antenatal patients, but also for those who are delivering and who are post-delivery. General demand is high. Karuna Trust has had a difficult time convincing a physician to stay beyond six months in this facility, as it is a post the doctor does not leave. The doctor lives in the hospital, works in the hospital and demand prevents time off. The post-partum ward is located beyond the waiting area, behind an iron gate in a dusty open-windowed hallway. The windows are open toward the street and without screens. People are able to peer into the windows and see the patients recovering in the wards. There is no privacy here. The lack of screens on the windows allows dust, debris, flies and pollution from the streets to enter the hallway and then into the adjoining wards. The wards are stuffy, hot and fly-infested. The beds are hard, flat cots covered in a single, soiled green sheet. It is here where women lay with their newborn babies recovering from birth.
I am putting together a tutorial to teach safe hygiene practices to the staff at the Karuna Trust PHCs and hospitals. I’m also proposing to train a hygiene officer at each clinic who will have the responsibility of enforcing the tutorial, ordering and restocking hygiene supplies and training new staff members. Lastly, I hope to convince Karuna Trust to provide hand sanitizer to the PHCs, especially where the sink to bed ratio is low. This would require the use of funds, but would be a cost effective and beneficial means of moving towards better hygiene practices. Hopefully I can also spend time at SM and improve the situation in the wards.
As for the interns, we are tough. We have dealt with jungle walks home, at night, missing our torches and tigers growling from behind bushes (was it a tiger? Maybe it was a dog. No, most certainly it was a tiger). We have danced with spiders the size of our fists. We have bathed under the watchful eye of lizards... and monkeys. We ride buses with people in the bus, people on top of the bus and just when you think one more person cannot fit, twenty more jump inside. We have been chased by wild boars while tossing out our mango peels . We have gone in circles trying to identify the lump in the middle of the floor ("monkey poop or berries?").
We are indeed having a blast.
Koren
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Internship Update
So now we are almost 2 weeks into our internship, and we are getting settled into our individual projects. We have travelled around to various different Primary Health Centers, community health centers, and Karuna Trust offices and seen a lot of Karnataka! I definitely feel excited about finishing up the project of outpatient Community Health Insurance with Alex, and ready to get started on my next project about tribal health promotion in the BR Hills! I have been quite pleased with the weather recently - there has been a lot of rain and it is much cooler outside!
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