And I thought I’d better post something to keep updated. It’s been a really busy few weeks around here. Mostly it’s been medical stuff so thanks to each and every one of you who sent something to the emergency fund - it’s urgently needed and deeply appreciated and the emergencies are ongoing. We’ve reached (well more or less) the end of the monsoon season and there are a lot of illnesses right now, ranging from severe digestive disorders to bronchitis and rather an epidemic of asthma and allergies due to mold, mildew and other things that go bump in the chronic dampness.
Last week, Lena spent rather a lot of her time at the hospital in Mandi getting one person or another seen, biopsied, etc. Thursday night she had just literally gotten home from taking a bunch of folks for tests and medicine when she got an emergency phone call from Khenpo down in town. One of the nuns she’d been helping to care for had taken a bad turn and was… well, unclear by phone what she was doing, but it sounded bad. So Lena runs back down to town and then calls up to say, yup, they’re running for the hospital as an emergency. She got home sometime in the middle of the night, having admitted the patient, seen her started on IV antibiotics, set that all up and provided people to stay and care for her (you can’t just have the nurses here, they don’t actually tend to patients without a family member making them do so. It’s India. Rural India…) She slept a few hours and then took a bus back down to Mandi to try to catch up with the attending doctor making his rounds. The rest of the weekend pretty much went like that, including that, every time any one of us was at home, a whole flock of folks needing medical help,translation or something decended on our door. Our livingroom tends to look like this on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings:
The nun was discharged Sunday afternoon so into Mandi Lena went again to fetch her back to Rewalsar. She’s still bedridden, but slowly improving, staying with friends. The nun that is, not Lena. The nun, Sherab Dolma, was extremely sick with various systemic infections, dehydration, losing consciousness. This is one of the cases that, without the services provided in hospital, would not have survived. And it would simply have been said, “she had pains in her stomach, got a fever and then, in a few days she died.” Lena’s running into town everyday to give her antibiotic injections. However her entire hospitalization, doctor’s care (not including Lena’s care) tests and so forth, have probably run under $500.00 US. She’s a recent escapee however and has no money, not even a home. Once again the emergency fund came to the rescue.
Meanwhile, I’m having rather a lot of culture shock these days. There is a lot of beauty around here and a sense of accomplishing good work, but the learning curve is steep for me. Some common practices just make no sense to someone from urban America. Some things (a propensity to broadcast all religious services that happen at 5 a.m. at top volume throughout the town) are both irritating and astonish me in their absolutely disregard for the sensibilities of other people. In fact, that’s probably the single hardest thing for me to assimilate - the behaviors which would, in the West, be considered out and out rude but which are perfectly normal here. I really do get that many of my normal behaviors and assumptions are equally incomprehensible to people raised here, but it’s shocking none the less to have folks simply opening the door and walking into my bedroom without knocking or asking the kind of personal questions that would be unthinkable in San Francisco. So I find myself frequently at war between my intellectual understanding of differences and my conditioned emotional responses that all too often include outrage or even anger.
It’ll pass, I have been assured by many people. I’ll learn to let things roll off my back. I’ll come to sleep through the loud chanting. I’ll remember to lock my door. I sure hope so because there’s a lot to learn. Including Hindi. I’m trying to increase my rudimentary vocabulary so that I can actually do things like talk to merchants in town, negotiate the bus system and give instructions to Malka, our housekeeper.
Actually, she speaks a rural dialect that bears only partial resemblance to Hindi, but understands enough that Lena can make herself understood. We find it frustrating that I can’t manage the supervision of housework effectively when Lena isn’t here. So I’m on a campaign to learn more. At a guess, I know about 50 words, pretty equally divided among pronouns, simple verbs, nouns and adjectives such a big and little with a few important prepositions thrown in for good measure. I need at least a 200 word vocabulary to be functional in a language. With a little work, that ought to be possible in about a month. My Tibetan, on the other hand, is passable and getting better by the day the more I use it and hear it spoken daily. I’m quite able to make myself understood about essential matters and even some abstracts and jokes among the Tibetans who make any effort to understand my accent. Essential services however, are almost entirely in the control of the Himachali Indian people as this is, after all, India by language and local ethnicity, even if there is a very significant local refugee population. There are many Tibetans who have lived here for 40 years as well as a whole younger generation raised in India who speak Hindi and Tibetan equally well. The older folks who have settled in here for life tend to be multilingual.
We find that we provide the emergency services and assistance to new refugees in greater numbers than any other segment of the population. First, they are more likely to be suffering from illnesses related to the trauma of dislocation and adapting to a new and very different place with a different climate, foods and, most significantly, new bacteria to which they have no immunity. Digestive disturbances from mild to severe are extremely common among the sanjor, the new escapees. Infections of the skin, bones and mucous membranes are a close second followed by respiratory problems, everything from tuberculosis to chronic asthma and the seasonal afflictions of colds and pneumonia. We also see a huge number of monk and nuns, including those who have been here awhile as these also commonly haven’t the financial or cultural resources to seek out medical care, nor do they have the confidence and trust in the Indian medical system to do so. We do see and treat plenty of villagers, usually the poorest and sickest, who lack even the few rupees to try to find a doctor in Mandi. In order to be able to participate in the overall wellbeing of this village and this region, we made contact with the local charitable society, mostly comprised of retired Indian businessmen, who help a bit and feel good about themselves for doing something for the less fortunate. In typical Indian fashion, the name of this organization does not spare the sensibilities of those it tries to help. This is the cover of the brochure we were given when we formally joined this society - thereby gaining the good will and official sanction of the local VIPs:
Another good motivation for improving my Hindi is that I’d also like to be able to talk to our neighbors more effectively and to be able to say more than good morning to those who pass by. We live on a main road. People go up and down all day on their way to the villages at the top of the mountain range. They carry their children, their goods, they drive their scooters and cars - and their livestock. Even if we can’t always understand each other, we say hello as best we can. The universal language of a smile and a wave goes a long way:
And then there are neighbors with whom spoken language just doesn’t work. The monkeys around here speak only the language of food and shelter and understand either a piece of tossed fruit or the waving of a big stick. Not much else gets their attention.
