Journal 10-5-2010

Journal 10-5-2010

Today was an incredibly productive day. I made it to the physiotherapy department by 8:00 where I meet David. I talked with David about my project for a while, we were able to more concretely define what I needed to do. David also demonstrated the testing technique the scoring method on a patient.

This patient had complete loss of sensation in his left foot. But only slight loss of sensation in his right.

I spent the rest of the morning in the library trying to locate studies that deal with sensory testing in rural Indian populations. I found two good studies that the hospital had in print in their archives of Leprosy Review.

Later in the afternoon John, Leah and I decided that we needed to go into town to get groceries and to meet up with Kanav our friend from VIT who was going to help me get internet on my laptop. It was also Leah’s birthday and we had planned on going to dinner at Darlings in Velore.

Unfortunately for Leah and John it took a little longer than expected for me to take care of my laptop situation. First I went to Sanje’s shop across the street from VIT. He called Kanav who walked over from his apartment a couple of minutes away. Kanav then told me that fiddling with the operating system software and then buying a usb modem wasn’t going to work because my Ibook doesn’t have an intel processor. Instead Kanav came up with an even better and more innovative plan. Kanav brought us back to his apartment where he installed a script or something on my computer.

Then he hooked it up to an old smart phone of his with a USB cabel. He had just gotten a new phone and wasn’t using this one anymore so he is lending it to me for until I leave Karigiri. This is what the setup looks like, it is painfully slow but it does get reception in our room, which is more than I can say for any of the USB modems.

At first I didn’t really know what to think about this guy helping me out like this. In the US nobody would just help someone they just met by lending them a smartphone and a simcard. But over the past couple of days we have hung out with Kanav a bit more and I can only conclude that he and his friends are just a bunch of unique and awesome dudes. They even had a talk with us about people who might try to take advantage of us to address any unspoken concerns. Meeting Sanje and Kanav has been a really great part of the trip because it has given us access to Indian college life, which until now this has been a very inaccessible part of India. It is great to talk with people from India that are our age. It has given me a totally different perspective about everything, especially the gender and relationship issues. Most of all it is great to be able to enlarge our friend group and have people to hang out with.