Journal 10-15-2010
This morning John was waiting on some charts to be delivered to the physiotherapy dept. So in the morning he came out with me again to try to find people to test for my project. We stopped at the village that is immediately adjacent to the Karigiri hospital campus. When we started to walk around we found a man sitting next to a bright orange house that was being built. We started talking to him although he spoke no English. Eventually another small crowd gathered and we were able to communicate the idea that we wanted to test their feet. The people here scored very low on the foot test. They had very thickly calloused feet. One of them had clawing in his right hand and appeared to have some sort of mental handicap. When we were done testing the people in the group we walked across the street through a gate. We quickly realized that we had found the leprosy colony. People with disfigured faces and extremities waved hello to us and pressed their hands together in the Indian welcome. We smiled widely at everyone and walked slowly around the colony. The leprosy patients were extremely friendly. The people we saw seemed to be leprosy patients that had suffered sever permanent disfigurement, for the most part they appeared to be in good health otherwise. I think that they are probably former patients that choose not to re-enter into society because of the way that they have been disfigured. Later in the day I was able to test two of the rickshaw drivers that I have become buddies with, their names are Gopi and Loganathan. On Friday night John, Leah and I went into VIT to get pizza with Kanav and Shubham. I also got to talk to Dad which was really nice, I have done a terrible job of keeping in touch with my family (sorry guys). But the lack of an internet connection makes calling and emailing home a lot harder.
No comments:
Post a Comment