Let me tell you what happened, only backwards


I made a hand motion of typing and said I would

A man I never met said "tell people about this"

I thanked the head sister of the Saint Teresa Missionaries of Charity Home for Dying and Destitute in Majnu ka Tila

A very happy Asian adolescent came inside to have the dressing on his stump changed

I sat and spoke to a 22-year old from Darjeeling - his baptismal name is Williams. He wants to make it home to spend Christmas with his mother. He told me he was attacked and beaten up. He seems untouched except for two holes in his shin.

I sat and made exaggerated wincing, breathing, and fist clenching actions while Williams' dressing was changed and a bloody rag fully inserted into the larger hole in his shin. He made painful faces but also smiled and told that he had been here two weeks, and te first three days he "cried too much" when the dressing was changed - how about points for bedside manner?

He smiled at me and I made a motion indicating scissors and tapped my head to show how incompetent I was with the scissors

I tried one last final ultimate time to use the damn scissors to cut off a patients' dressing

I watched as the younger orderly deftly used the same pair of dull scissors to remove a bandage

I thought that since I couldn't seem to actually cut any bandages, I should make fun of myself and amuse the eight bedridden men, very diverse in age and ethnicity; I could make eye contact, smile, and appreciate their wincing as iodine was poured on their open wounds

I tried every fudging pair of scissors looking for a sharp pair

I failed one more time to cut off a bandage

I started to feel stupid that my literate, articulate, law school-bound self couldn't operate a pair of scissors - I guess I always choose paper (be-dum-dum-chi on the drum kit, mimic swinging a golf club and click your tongue at the right moment)

I couldn't quite seem to make any leeway with the scissors

I was handed a pair of gloves and given no instructions or attention as Uday, who wore a respirator, and a younger orderly (who I was told was mentally ill but handled himself well) wheeled in a cart containing colanders, scissors, gauze wraps, and bottles of disinfectant

I walked around to the places I hadn't been yesterday, the ktichen and the corridor to the women's side

Meeting various residents, I shook hands and said hello or brought my palms together and said namasthe ('the' sounding as aspirated 'te' - aren't you just dying for a long lecture about phonetics?)

THE DAY BEFORE

I took back the pen and the pad

Everyone gathered around to see how caricatures of famous political figures were rapidly magically appearing on this paper

I brought out pen and paper

Geoff and I spoke with the sane, English speaking residents, both tuberculosis sufferers, one of whom told us he once worked for the BBC drawing political cartoons

I asked if they ever had a ball they kicked around, or paper and pens to make drawings

We were shown into the men's ward while Natali was taken to the women's

Geoff came by our room to ask if we wanted to go visit the nearest branch of Saint Teresa's orgnization

We met Geoff at the hotel restaurant and back at the room Natali cut his hair with scissors, and trimmed the back of his neck with a razor



Very cool, no? This mostly took place in a courtyard full of mentally ill men, rocking back andforth or mumbling, like an Indian version of Cuckoo's Nest with a nun for Nurse Ratchett

What was Natali's experience like, you ask? The women all wanted to come right up to her, to smile at her, to touch her, to show her their painted fingernails

Joff Munro is a Haligonian who wants to be a doctor, graduated, wrote the MCATs but was rejected but wil keep trying

DOB SEZ:

I've gotten positive feedback on ths weblog which makes me glow, frankly. Thank you for listening and don't worry, pictures and maybe even a spellcheck / overhaul coming eventually!

Stay tuned for our experiences at the India Social Forum, where my name on a registration sheet is sure to blacklist me in some future Orwellian nightmare! If that Israel comment didn't already...damn you JINSA!

And finally, the A-HA! album that Take On Me is on is called Hunting High and Low - I always wondered if any of the other songs were any good